De Kleefse reis van Jan Jacob Brants

John Maurice, Prince of Nassau-Siegen was stadtholder of the German city of Kleve from 1647 onwards. He created his own paradise there and during the following centuries many Dutch travellers found their way to this city just across the border. Kleve (Kleef in Dutch) was also the destination for Jan Jacob Brants and his fellow travellers in or around 1790. The record of their trip (and the route taken) comes in the form of an overview of costs incurred. It raises the question whether Brants deliberately visited some gardens created by the architect he himself had employed just before he went on this trip. Johan Georg Michael had created gardens and parks closer to home, but Brants possibly wanted to see the ones further afield?

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Summary

John Maurice, Prince of Nassau-Siegen was stadtholder of the German city of Kleve from 1647 onwards. He created his own paradise there and during the following centuries many Dutch travellers found their way to this city just across the border. Kleve (Kleef in Dutch) was also the destination for Jan Jacob Brants and his fellow travellers in or around 1790. The record of their trip (and the route taken) comes in the form of an overview of costs incurred. It raises the question whether Brants deliberately visited some gardens created by the architect he himself had employed just before he went on this trip. Johan Georg Michael had created gardens and parks closer to home, but Brants possibly wanted to see the ones further afield?

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De tuinen van Bierens aan de Amstel

Filling in some blanks: the couple owning a garden I wrote about, was looking for a new gardener in 1788. For Willem Roeters, one of the candidates, information about his previous experience pointed towards two now virtually unknown gardens. The ever increasing indexes of the Amsterdam Municipal Archives helped identify one of these gardens (or rather: two adjacent ones from one owner), a garden poem and even its head gardener. But it doesn’t seem to have been a garden where Roeters could have learned the craft of modern gardening. There still is one garden left to identify, though.

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Summary

Filling in some blanks: the couple owning a garden I wrote about, was looking for a new gardener in 1788. For Willem Roeters, one of the candidates, information about his previous experience pointed towards two now virtually unknown gardens. The ever increasing indexes of the Amsterdam Municipal Archives helped identify one of these gardens (or rather: two adjacent ones from one owner), a garden poem and even its head gardener. But it doesn’t seem to have been a garden where Roeters could have learned the craft of modern gardening. There still is one garden left to identify, though.

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Voorland in de Watergraafsmeer

Published: my latest article in the third collection of articles by Cascade, the garden history society of the Netherlands. Themed ‘lost gardens’, my piece focusses on Voorland near Amsterdam. Even before this garden disappeared under the (previous!) stadium of football club Ajax in 1934, the estate had already been dismantled and turned into a regular farm in 1845.
The increasingly digitised archives of the Six-family give a fair amount of detail about the people involved with the design and layout of this garden. They (Johann Georg Michael and his ‘help’ or ‘aide’ – future son-in-law Johann David Zocher) belong to the top of Dutch garden designers of the late 18th, early 19th century. And yes, they were both of German origin.

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Summary

Published: my latest article in the third collection of articles by Cascade, the garden history society of the Netherlands. Themed ‘lost gardens’, my piece focusses on Voorland near Amsterdam. Even before this garden disappeared under the (previous!) stadium of football club Ajax in 1934, the estate had already been dismantled and turned into a regular farm in 1845.
The increasingly digitised archives of the Six-family give a fair amount of detail about the people involved with the design and layout of this garden. They (Johann Georg Michael and his ‘help’ or ‘aide’ – future son-in-law Johann David Zocher) belong to the top of Dutch garden designers of the late 18th, early 19th century. And yes, they were both of German origin.

Continue reading