The Tidy Garden and the Terrifying Wilderness
So elegant and artful! Heavenly, even! The gardens of the Zijdebalen country estate in Utrecht were simply sublime, wrote the poet Arnold Hoogvliet in 1740. There he admired sweeping vistas, leafy avenues and splashing, ‘crystalline’ water. There was a pond with flamingos from the Americas, orange and banana trees, and even pineapples grew there. These would not normally grow in Utrecht, but human hands had enabled them to thrive there in the cool climate: ‘Art supplies what Nature lacks,’ Hoogvliet wrote, in the somewhat grandiloquent language typical of the period in which he lived.
Jan de Beijer, View from the Bergje, across the parterre, in the Zijdebalen avenue. 1746. Collection of the Centraal Museum Utrecht, purchased with the support of the Vereniging Rembrandt in 1980, inventory number 22613.
Nature in itself was beautiful, Hoogvliet and many of his contemporaries believed, but it only became truly pleasing when humans intervened, elevating plants, animals and inanimate matter to a new level. That was why the hedges in Zijdebalen’s fashionable garden were elegantly trimmed, artificial grottoes were adorned with stones and shells brought from far and wide, and the owner had statues of figures from Greek and Roman mythology placed among the greenery.
There were many more gardens like Zijdebalen to admire in eighteenth-century Europe. And many gardens today have been designed in the same spirit. They may be less lavish, but the neat lawns, clipped hedges and even the colourful borders tended by enthusiasts today are likewise based on the idea that greenery should conform to human standards of good taste. This, in turn, is rooted in a deeply held belief: that nature exists for humankind and should be shaped by and for it.
That idea takes center stage in the exhibition Drawn from Nature. Alongside much more, it features drawings of the gardens of Zijdebalen.
Jan de Beijer, View of the garden from the Zijdebalen house, 1745. Centraal Museum collection, purchased with the support of the Vereniging Rembrandt in 1980, inventory number 22621.
Jan de Beijer, Zijdebalen, view of the shell grotto, 1745. Centraal Museum collection, purchased with the support of the Vereniging Rembrandt in 1980, inventory number 22624.
Jan de Beijer, The Duck Pond in the Garden of the Zijdebalen Country Estate, 1746. Centraal Museum collection, purchased with the support of the Vereniging Rembrandt in 1980, inventory number 22611.
The tendency to dominate nature is partly a response to living in fear of it: fear of severe weather, epidemics, hunger and other hardships, which are also explored in the exhibition. Those who live in fear of such catastrophes may begin to dream of a safe world, with nature tamed. At its most extreme, this results in the kind of garden Hoogvliet so enjoyed, and the meticulously ordered gardens still seen on many streets today, free of ‘weeds’ and with as few digging, nibbling and stinging creatures as possible.
But not long after Hoogvliet sang the praises of Zijdebalen’s splendour, the Romantics advocated a third attitude towards nature. They idealised the wilderness and dreamed of a natural existence—although what exactly that entailed was not entirely clear. Moreover, from the nineteenth century onwards, biologists demonstrated unequivocally that human beings were themselves part of nature and connected in complex ways to the rest of life on Earth. This is the exhibition’s third main theme: living as part of nature.
One of the many results of this way of thinking can be seen in the growing number of garden owners turning away from cultivated gardens. They give plants room to grow, and when they do intervene, they put up bee hotels or plant native species that provide insects with food and shelter.
Arnold Hoogvliet would have found those gardens rather dull, and decidedly lacking in refinement. And if he were to hear of even more far-reaching attempts to bring back the wilderness—even wolves—he might well revert to the fear of nature that he and his contemporaries were trying to overcome.
Jan de Beijer, View from the Bergje across the pond towards the house, 1745. Collection of the Centraal Museum, purchased with the support of the Vereniging Rembrandt in 1980, inventory number 22623.
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