Overcrowded Gardens: The Garden of Euphues

In their most extreme form they reverse the plan of a vista garden. As a compensation for its lack of extent and contour the Dutch garden sought variety and became overcrowded. Having neither prospect, fountains, cascades, nor architectural features, it made up with statuary, pot plants and topiary devices, particularly the last. The typical Dutch garden was valued not for its unity of design, but for its variety of detail. Sir William Chambers reported of the Dutch gardens in the middle of the eighteenth century: `In Holland parterres, embroidered in box, brick-dust, sea-coal, and broken porcelain, are everywhere admired. No garden is perfect that is not surrounded with a wet ditch, and many lusthouses hanging over it for smoking tobacco; nor is there any elegance, without some tons of lead, transformed into skating Dutchmen, Harlequins, and fluting Shepherdesses, all nicely painted, in proper colours; and golden Mercuries are perched, like birds, upon every pinnacle: every pass is guarded by some pasteboard Grenadiers; and Fame, straddling over the entrance, displays a Dutch label to the passenger, telling the name and beauties of the place, the virtues and moral opinions of the proprietor.' The Netherlander is by temperament hard-headed, realistic, pugnacious, matter-of-fact, insular, practical... he is not volatile, fanciful, or notably light of touch. These latter are more obviously French qualities. Nevertheless, despite the strong opposition of character and of interest, the influence of the French garden's reputation was so great that Louis XIV's opponent William of Orange constructed the main plan of the gardens at his favourite palace of Het Loo upon the French model. One looks in vain at the plan of Het Loo and the few other great Dutch gardens of the period for any major feature which could distinguish them from French gardens, unless perhaps it is an absence of the lateral development which gave Versailles the subordinate vistas from the home parterre over the orangery and the Piece d'eau des Suisses on the left and down the northern parterre to the Neptune Fountain on the right. The Dutch gardens in the French manner seem to be firmly held by the rectilinear pattern of their countryside. But this difference, even if it were found consistently true, merely makes these gardens more French than the French and emphasizes the unilateral vista more than Le Notre ever did.