The trees on the smallest island have all been chopped away, but no replanting has taken place here. The result is an eery blob, sticking out of the pond like an outgrown pimple.

• Broekhuizen after the restoration.

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• Broekhuizen during the restoration in 2008.

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• The islands in 2008.

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• The small island in 2010.

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  Clean cut and shaven.

  

• The new plants on the bigger island.

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  Too much and too linear, if you ask me.

  

All photos by HvdE.

The bigger island is even worse, although here not all trees have been cut and replanting has taken place. The choice to plant Rhododendron here is good, both islands needed some lower plants and colour. It won’t win the landscape architects Bleeker and Nauta a designer’s originality prize, but it works.
What does not work and what constitutes the gruesome part of this bigger island is the way the new shrubs have been planted: in strict alignment and in MASSIVE amounts. I do not know who is ultimately responsible for this, so I’ll resort to two personal remarks:

1. They could have easily done with 2/3 of the plants used here (so they would have had enough material left to replant the smaller island with -if that was at all the plan). I cannot see a reason to plant so closely together on a location where people cannot come: they are not likely to make short cuts through a more loosely planted section, are they?
2. The absense of creativity is exemplified by the placement of the Rhododendrons. It is almost as if indicating altitude lines on the steep slopes of the island was part of the assignment.

The immense density of plants, forced into a grid-like planting scheme, is evocative of how Staatsbosbeheer used to ruin forests and ‘nature’ in The Netherlands till far into the 1980s. Since then the organisation has been re-evaluating and adapting that practise. If responsible for the execution, it has somehow forgotten about that in this project. But looking at the planting scheme the density is a blessing: within a few years nobody will notice anymore.

1. Adding this footnote because I stumbled upon the website of the last private owner of Broekhuizen. He has a lot of pre-restoration photos and photos of the interior that are usually not easy to find. According to the sales brochure, the interior has remained relatively intact, so this way we can see what the interested parties will see tomorrow, Thursday May 27th. [back]

But Wingfield hardly mentions the plants he used. Almost at the end of his description of the terraces he writes:

The pleasure grounds are filled wih many kinds of rare plants and shrubs, many of which would not be hardy in England, but which thrive in the temperate climate of the Green Isle. Rare conifers as well as deciduous trees are scattered through the grounds, and those which I have myself planted are now growing to a considerable size, Wellingtonias, araucarias, and others having reached a height of fifty and sixty feet, and even more, (…).¹

He then goes on to talk about a few specific plants and species, but I would like to zoom in on the araucarias he mentioned. A few pages earlier he writes about the terrace walk, which he extended to a lentgh of 800 yards (730 meters), running outside the garden at the (south)western end ‘as far as the level ground permitted, to the edge of the slope at the oak-wood called “The Dead Man’s Bank”‘. He placed a statue of Ajax at that end and

(…) planted an avenue of araucarias and abies Douglasii from the part where the garden terminates to this statue.²

I know Wingfield was proud of the variety of plants that thrived in his garden. But combining Araucaria araucana and Pseudotsuga menziesii (‘abies Douglasii’ is a synonym) seems like stretching things to their limit. I would at least never have thought of this combination if I were asked to plant an avenue of mixed evergreens in a period garden, and know of no other examples.

1. Mervyn E. Wingfield, A Description and History of Powerscourt, London (1903), p95. The araucarias he planted himself were in a grove further from the house, near Bahana and Onagh Bridge (op. cit. p107). He planted 100 of them, ‘thinking that in future times his would make a remarkable feature of the place’. [back]
2. op. cit., p90. [back]

It grew in the garden of Beeckestijn, which is not far from the coast -and thus already in a milder climate because the relatively higher temperature of the sea water dampens the effects of winter in this part of the country. In the article the plant was called a “Pyrus Japonica” and it is possible that here the Pyrus japonica (Thunb) is meant; we now know this plant as Chaenomeles japonica, a prickly plant bearing fruit that ripens very late in the year.
But it could also be the fine plant with small white flowers called Pieris japonica.² Both plants were discovered or first described by the same botanist, Thunberg.
Carl Peter Thunberg was a Swedish student of Linnaeus who lived from 1743-1828. He studied in Uppsala, Paris, Amsterdam and Leiden. In The Netherlands he joined the Dutch East India Company (V.O.C.) and traveled to Japan in December 1771. He returned in 1778 after visiting Japan and China and a short stop in South Africa on the way back. In 1784, back in Sweden, Thunberg published his Flora Japonica sistens plantas insularum japonicarum… (etc.), in which the Pyrus japonica is mentioned.

The news article goes on to say that the plant had 150 flowers in bloom in February 1822 and an equal amount of buds ready to go. A rather remarkable claim is that the plant was 8 feet (voet) high, which- if we take the (then) normal Rijnlandse Voet as a reference, would amount to a height of 2,54 meters. This means the plant must have stood there for quite a while, or had been planted there at a fairly old age.
The contemporary owner of Beeckestijn, Willem François Boreel (1775-1851), was a keen gardener, but at this stage he had owned the estate for only nine years -not enough to have a plant like this grow this large.³ The original creator of the landscape garden at Beeckestijn had died in April 1778, six months before Thunberg returned from his voyage to the east. So the Pyrus japonica mentioned in the news article, probably a Chaenomeles japonica, has almost certainly been planted in the garden by Willem Boreel (1744-1796) or his wife and widow Maria Trip (1750-1813).

1. “Haarlem, den 18 Februarij. Als een zeldzaam bewijs van de zachte luchtsgesteldheid, kan men aanmerken, het gedurende den geheelen winter in de opene lucht bloeijen, van eene Pyrus Japonica, op de hofstede Bekestein, onder Velzen. De gemelde plant heeft thans de hoogte van 8 voeten bereikt en bloeit ter hoogte van zes voeten. Men telt aan dezelve 150 bloemen en ruim zoo veel knoppen.” ‘s Gravenhaagsche Courant, 18 February 1822, page 1. [back]
2. There is one obvious and popular mistake in the writing of the name, so we can’t exclude other possible mistakes made by the journalist or during the printing stage. [back]
3. In 1821 he had won a silver medal on a countrywide exhibition for an especially large and heavily blooming Metrosideros citrina (now Callistemon citrinus).
   [back]

There’s a hint of earlier developments taking place in the 1750s, based on 18th century remarks that are vague¹, or made decades after the ‘fact’.² My recent addition to that short list is published as one of the many different articles in this new book.³ It might not be regarded better than the other examples, because I am writing about a garden that has been demolished in 1804 and of which we do not have any visual record.
My findings with respect to the garden of Sandenhoeff in Overveen do show that it was quite difficult for garden owners in Holland to acquire knowledge about the new gardens in the 1750s and early 1760s. Despite the abundance of knowledge that by then had been built up at the other side of the North Sea, in England.

But the account book entry of a payment for 60 American trees and seeds, made by Sandenhoeff‘s owner Cornelis Backer (1692-1766) in April 1756, can not mean anything other than this: he was trying to create his own landscape garden. And as this payment was also for the delivery of the plants, he may have even started in 1755.
Too bad no visual record of the garden seems to exist.

(Edited to add the correct title of the book and the names of its main editors)

1. The Swede Bengt Ferrner mentioning a ‘natural’ layout at Watervliet, 1759. [back]
2. Harmannus Numan writing in 1797 on developments at Over-Holland that had supposedly taken place from 1756 onwards -a claim that to my knowledge has yet to be confirmed. [back]
3. Henk van der Eijk, ‘Sandenhoeff: een vroeg landschappelijke tuin?’, in: Cacsade 18 (2), 2009, p104-110. Available in stores as: Arinda van der Does, Jan Holwerda (editors), Tuingeschiedenis in Nederland. Veelzijdig erfgoed in ‘t groen (Utrecht 2009). [back]

Avenues are among the most formal and architectural features in any garden, and although their use may vary (lead the eye to a focal point, connect and pull together different parts of the garden, act as a screen or divider between garden parts), it is almost always characterised by the uniform appearance of similar trees placed in a linear pattern. This uniformity can become dull, and while dullness is not something any garden owner or architect strives for, many variations to the theme have been tried. Thus we find gardens in which the avenues are lined by a combination of different sorts of deciduous trees, like oak and lime. Around 1800 the Champs Elysées in Paris was lined with old chestnut trees, which, according to a visitor, formed a beautiful backdrop for the locust trees (Acacia) also planted there.¹

What we see less often is an avenue lined with a variety of deciduous and coniferous or evergreen trees. This practise probably began just before the rise of the landscape style on the European continent. The attraction of such a combination is obvious: the avenue always retains some of its green and its capacity to form a screen. The general difference in growth form between the two types of trees is also attractive.
At Beeckestijn this may have been the case: the alternate depiction of ‘normal’ and pyramidal trees at least suggests this mix. We do not know what types of trees were planted here.

There are only a few other examples known in The Netherlands. I mention them here, because I hope to gather more information on this type of planting in avenues. Two of these examples date from the second half of the eighteenth century and the other was designed and planted during the 1890′s.
Starting with the latter, the Boombergpark in Hilversum, there was a special purpose to the alternate planting of beech and larch. According to the authors of a recent book on the park, the larches were used as sun blocks, to protect the sensitive bark of the freshly planted beech trees.² This view is supported by the fact that the larches were cut out 25 years later because they had “lost their purpose”. In his design for the Boombergpark in Hilversum, landscape architect Dirk Wattez used this kind of planting for two avenues. One was a single lined, slightly winding avenue on the western side of the park where different kinds of trees are planted alternately along the side of the paths. The other -straight- avenue was on the eastern side of the park, with two rows of trees on one side and three on the other (see right hand image). Where there are three rows of trees, they are planted in a quincunx formation, with again alternating sorts along the roadside. Wattez used a smart pattern here, because his plantation was set up in such a way, that from whichever way one looked, there were never three trees of the same species planted in one line. So although the larches may only have had a practical use in the end, Wattez made sure they made an aesthetic impression while they lasted.

The two 18th century examples are Beeckestijn and Twickel. The original planting of both avenues is long gone, leaving us with no information about the species planted there. Two contemporary German examples, of which we do know which species were used, show some possibilities.
The first is not far from The Netherlands, in fact just over the border with Germany in the garden of Kleef (Kleve). In 1781 an avenue of beech and fir was mentioned by Pieter van Winter.³ Van Winter admired the contrast between the colours and texture of both sorts (bright green and soft for the beech; paler green and needle-like for the fir tree). He also says the trees had grown considerably since he saw them earlier, which indicates the trees must have been planted somewhere in the 1760′s or 1770′s.
The second German example is near Aschaffenburg: Schönbusch. Like Beeckestijn, this garden was a mix of baroque elements and landscape garden design, although the execution of the landscape garden at Schönbusch was much bolder than the Dutch garden. For a more formal part of the garden, head gardener Müller was told by the Prince-Elector (Kurfüst) to transform a chestnut avenue into a mixed avenue. He was ordered to plant large larches between the chestnuts: “(…) [zwischen] 2 Kastanien-Baümen jedesmalen ein wohlgewachsener Lerchenbaum hineingepflanzet werden solle (…)“. The reaction of the Prince-elector’s advisor Sickingen is telling: he thinks this is not a good idea, because in his view planting larches between chestnuts in a straight avenue alongside water is of and old fashioned artificiality that was not suitable for a modern garden like Schönbusch.⁴

Going back to Beeckestijn, current belief is that this mixed avenue was planted between 1755 and 1760.⁵ This fits in with what both German examples show: planting mixed avenues was en vogue in the third quarter of the 18th century. It appears to have been swept away by the landscape style coming in from England during that same period. Some of the early landscape gardens kept these mixed avenues intact, possibly because they were still deemed to be modern enough to last for a while.
During the reconstruction ten years ago, in a long and difficult discussion about what to plant here, a compromise was reached: a combination of lime and thuja was planted in this avenue. I was present at that discussion and I believe it is safe to say that none of the participants was happy with this choice. But politically it was the only combination possible at the time.
Back then, the information cited above was not available to the restoration team. Now Beeckestijn is on the threshold of a new start, and the thuja’s are suffering and lagging behind the lime trees (or just plain dead), it is not too late to use this information and do the right thing: dig out the thuja’s and plant firs or larches instead.

Please. It can be done in the next months.

1. Pieter van Winter, writing to his daughter in 1802: “(…) ook doet de importante hoogte en zwaare belommering van oude kastanjeboomen en Acacia’s die tegen elkander een goed effect doen veel tot het schoone gelyk mede de stoffagie van duizende Wandelaaressen zeer voïant gekleed.” Letter from June 24, 1802, found in the Six collection (Amsterdam) inv.nr. 73683. I thank Ruud Priem for this information. [back]
2. Piet Bakker (et.al.), Het Boombergpark in Hilversum: verleden, heden en toekomst van een monumentaal wandelgebied (Hilversum 2005). [back]
3. Pieter van Winter, writing to his parents in 1781: “(…) by ons men heeft thans veele laanen met beuken en sparren om den anderen die sedert ik die gezien heb, vry wat gegroeit zyn en een admirabel adspect opleveren in ‘t groote daar ‘t levendig groen en zagt blad der eerste door het vaalder en penachtig blad der laatste; aardig word gecontrasteert (…).” I am not exactly sure what he means with the ‘by ons’ (here). He was traveling, so he could be referring both to home, or to his location at that moment. Letter from July 16, 1781, found in the Six collection (Amsterdam) inv.nr. 73661. I thank Ruud Priem for this information. [back]
4. J. Albert, W. Helmberger: Der Landschaftgarten Schönbusch bei Aschaffenburg (Worms 1999), p49, ill. 79 and note 197. [back]
5. This part of the garden was only added to Beeckestijn in 1755, and in 1760 the owner decided to start laying out his new garden in the landscape style he saw in England. The mixed avenue must be designed during those years. [back]

Hermit’s lodge in October 2007. Photo by HvdE.

That particular objective (not mentioned in my previous post) is that through an opening in the planting on the mount, a clear view at the hermit’s lodge on an island to the south of the temple would be established.¹
The picture below shows that last year that view was already there. This year it was even better because some of the plants on the mount were cleared. There is still some planting of evergreens to be done, all the way to the top of the hill. But I am quite certain they will keep this view in mind when the ‘Bergje’ is being replanted (probably in the 2008-2009 planting season).

View from the ‘Bergje’ towards the hermit’s lodge taken in October 2007 (out of focus). The site of the newly planted plane trees (Platanus) is highlighted in magenta. In ten years time these trees will have grown big enough to fully block the view at the lodge.
Photo by HvdE.

What I do not understand is highlighted in the photo above. Recently, but not later than Spring 2007, two plane trees (Platanus) have been planted on the field between the pond called ‘Grote Meer’ (with the island and the hermit’s lodge) and the smaller pond called ‘Fonteingat’ (at the foot of the mount, not visible on this photo).² There they accompany an age old plane oak tree. The two new trees are planted way too close to that mature specimen -one can already see them bending sideways, away from the extended branches of the old tree. The new trees are also planted closely to one another (although the angle makes the distance look ridiculously small here -they are further apart than that).³
I can only hope the two trees are planted there as an addition to the already impressive foliage the mature plane oak tree is providing. The only other explanation for those trees being there I can think of is that they are planted as back up for when the mature tree dies. Which -if true- would be a reenactment of a ‘revitalisation policy’ that became popular in the 1980s in forestry circles, but has long since been judged by garden historians and restorators as a good way to forever destroy the original intent of a garden design.

One could of course argue that Twickel is not actually restoring its park, but is, well… revitalising it. That plan includes the addition of features that serve the overall purpose. Apart from the temple, some other new features have already been added to the park that were not there before. And that is alright.
But if we zoom in on this particular action, it makes no difference what reason may have lead to choosing this location for the new plane trees. Because in ten to fifteen years time they will have grown large enough to completely block the otherwise meticulously planned view from the temple on top of the ‘Bergje’ towards the hermit’s lodge on the island.

Either the planned view is not considered important anymore, or the trees are planted there by mistake. It is a pitiful inconsistency, which ever way you look at it.

1. To quote architect Michael van Gessel on the Twickel website: “Daar heeft men dan plotseling het volle zicht op het park met de Hermitage op het eiland aan de zuidzijde van het Grote Meer als eindpunt.“ [back]
2. The plane trees were already planted at the time the statement quoted in note 1 was published. [back]
3. The fact that the new trees are planted so close may reflect a usual trick in landscape gardens. The trees will grow away from each other to create room for themselves. The result is that the combined crowns will look more mature at an early stage than could be achieved with one or two separate trees. [back]