July 23, 2025

On Wednesday July 23^rd at 11:30am, Jonas Danen, PhD-candidate of the Rachel Carson Center for Environment and Society, Ludwig-Maximilians-Universität Munich, will present 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 Dutch- looking houses.

This lecture will look 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.

To register for the Zoom lecture, please click here.

About Jonas Danen

Jonas Danen is a PhD-candidate from the Rachel Carson Center of Environment and Society (Ludwig-Maximilians-Universität Munich), where he is working on his dissertation project titled “The New World as Garden: Harvesting the Dutch Hudson Valley, 1609-1664”. There, he studies the role of “landscape” in the Dutch settlement in North America, what they started calling New Netherland. Some points that this project deals with are how the Dutch thought about and defined the landscape in a period of large-scale land reclamation projects; how they oriented and related themselves in and to lands and waters that had been managed by Indigenous peoples long before them; how New Netherland served as a crossroads where different “landscape cultures” from the American, African, and European continents came together; and how this all was manifested in the generally praised Dutch garden culture.

Originally born in the US, Jonas has grown up in the coastal cities of Alkmaar and Haarlem in the Netherlands and now lives close to the Alps in southern Germany. Besides his work in academia, Jonas likes to spend time in the outdoors and is part of an ongoing socio-ecological bat research project in the medieval Grote of St.-Bavokerk in Haarlem.