Historical Gardens

Plans to reconstruct the forecourt of Elswout have been presented by Stichting Plein Elswout. I’m wondering what they’ll do with the large trees at the edges of the site…

The Nederlands Fotomuseum in Rotterdam hosted a big Eugene Atget exhibition, which I visited on the last day it showed here, before it ships to Paris. That is of course the city that inspired Atget to make an enormous amount of photos. He avoided the new Paris, with its grand avenues, and focussed on the [...]

It is by no way restricted to Limburg, it happens all over the country: perfectly well developed trees are cut down in forests, avenues and woodland gardens because… the species involved are not ‘local’. In this particular case many specimens of what we call Amerikaanse eik (American Oak, or Quercus rubra), are removed from the [...]

The sudden cutting of trees at Duinvliet and Elswout in Overveen might show I was right about the early landscape layout of part of the garden – which partly consists of the now disappeared Sandenhoeff.

Statues dated 1866 made me think about how that section of the gardens at Saint-Cloud related to the 1870 destruction of the castle by fire. It must have been an early renovation of the Le Notre layout.

An altar dedicated to Selene (Luna) in the garden of Wörlitz bears a close resemblance to a 2nd century Roman Selene altar that used to stand in the Temple of Diana in the garden of Villa Borghese (now in the Louvre). The Wörlitz altar is a late 18th century version and not an exact copy.

The removal of trees around the Koepel van Stoop was probably a correct decision. But what about the follow-up? Is there any intention to replant the group of trees?

In its june 2011 session Unesco has entered the ‘Persian Garden’ on their World Heritage list. It is an acknowledgement of 2600 years of gardening in ‘failed state’ Iran. Nine locations are entered, ranging from gardens that only show bare essentials to pristine layouts.