Dutch style

History

The term Dutch style was used in early America to define an ancient or geometric style of garden design that predated the modern or natural style of design. It referred, for the most part, to the late seventeenth- and early eighteenth-century classical canal garden, which became popular in England under the reign of William and Mary and in America in the early colonial period in both Dutch and English settlements. These gardens were laid out with parallel axes, complex parterres, Italo-French fountains and sculpture, and geo.metrical topiary [Fig. 1].1 In An Encyclopaedia of Gardening (1826), J. C. Loudon provided a dozen plans for parterres in the Dutch style that exemplified its compartmentalized character [Fig. 2]. The Castello plan of New Amsterdam (1660) depicts, in a highly stylized manner, the type of garden called the Dutch style [Fig. 3].

Although the Dutch garden type prevailed in America in such colonies as New Netherlands and also in the British colonies [Fig. 4], evidence of the term’s use occurs only in the early nineteenth century.2 In gar.den literature of the period, discussion of this style was concerned with its contrast to the modern, naturalistic styles of landscape gardening that employed irregular, asymmetrical compositions and insisted on a subtler display of the hand of the artist/gardener. American writers such as Robert Buist, George Watterston, and A. J. Downing seem to have depended upon Horace Walpole and J. C. Loudon for their descriptions of the Dutch style.3 The illustration in Downing’s A Treatise on the Theory and Practice of Land.scape Gardening (1849) exemplifies the typi.cal Dutch style of garden that he also called the geometric. This image, however, placed in the chapter about the history of gardens, was not promoted by Downing as a new option in design.

During the early nineteenth century, however, with the interest in the revival of eclectic historical styles, the Dutch style for some became one of the many selections that one might make from a number of possibilities, particularly in the design of garden embellishments. According to an 1826 advertisement offered by André Parmentier’s horticultural and botanical garden in Brooklyn, a Dutch pavilion (along with Chinese, Turkish, French or rustic pavilions) was included in the list of “inexpensive fabrics.” Loudon (1834) published a view of a “rustic Dutch fountain,” which, he added, may be “erected at very little expense” [Fig. 5]. It remained in the realm of the exotic and the fantastic, or as Downing disparagingly quipped, “a distortion of nature.”

-- Therese O'Malley