Zoom Lecture: Gardens of New Netherland
July 23, 2025
On July 23rd, Jonas Danen, PhD-candidate of the Rachel Carson Center for Environment and Society, Ludwig-Maximilians-Universität Munich, presented a Zoom lecture on the Gardens of New Netherland.
“God created the earth but the Dutch made their own country.” Early modern Dutch culture has been defined as a long-developed attitude towards the management of created or safeguarded land. The young Republic of the Low Countries, while established in the late sixteenth century to revolt against Spanish oppression, was indeed intensely connected to its landscape and the waters that flowed around, through, and sometimes over it. The geography of the Republic, especially around its most populous and globally-connected western provinces with cities like Amsterdam, Leiden, and Haarlem, was the result of intense labor and creative inventions that aimed to create space for economic benefit in the shape of agriculture where there were first lakes and wetlands. This had also seeped through into the Dutch art of gardening that, in the seventeenth century, was characterized by geometrical lay-outs interspersed with canals and embellished with flowered parterres. The symbolical ties between the newly-created land and its gardens were so strong that the Republic itself became identified with a garden and its people with gardeners.
Some 3,600 miles westward, the Dutch were trying to design a new part of their garden but in a completely new context, with new soils, plants, and gardeners that had been there before them. The settlement of New Amsterdam, in particular, was presented as a small Dutch town on the outskirts of their colonial empire – complete with canals, fruit-producing orchards, and Dutchlooking houses.
This lecture looked at the multifaceted Transatlantic renderings of Dutch gardens in New Netherland. From the metaphorical “Republic as garden” (Hortus Batavus, as described above) to the kitchen garden planted behind a settler’s home to the ornamental pleasure garden designed after Dutch courtly gardens and everything in between; they all provided New Netherlanders with something essential to survive.
Click here to view the recording of the Zoom lecture on demand.