Hortus Botanicus

A visit to Amsterdam's Botanical Garden in December

In December I visited one of the oldest Botanic Gardens in the world, Amsterdam’s Hortus Botanicus. Nestled away in a quiet corner of the City’s old cobbled streets, adjacent, of course, to a canal, Hortus Botanicus was created in 1638. Certainly entering it is a little like going back in time; there is a palpable historical feel about the place.

In 1646 Johannes Snippendaal, Garden Director, catalogued 796, mainly medicinal, species of plants growing here, most of which can still be seen today. Over 200 years later, a systemic planting scheme of concentric half circles was created reflecting the layout of the city itself in a mimic of the four main canals that enclose the old town. Systemic planting, whereby plants that are closely related are grown adjacent to one another, is a common feature of botanic gardens and this formal encircling design, bordered by Box hedging, Buxus sempervirens, was popular in the Romantic Movement. Whilst December isn’t necessarily the most interesting month to visit a garden, it is a time when the design features often stand out as there is less planting to be seen.

The Medicinal Garden

At the back of the medicinal garden is the gate which was specially built for Botanist and Geneticist, Hugo de Vries, so as to try and persuade him to remain Chief Botanist of Hortus Botanicus, it being directly across from his tall beautiful town house where he lived so he was saved having to walk round to the front entrance. Known for his work on genetics, in his The Mutation Theory (1900–1903), de Vries “rediscovered” Mendle’s work of thirty years earlier and went on to describe how, at least in the lower organisms, genes could cross the species barrier. 

Hugo de Vries

I struggled to identify this climber over the arbour, Actinidia deliciosa. The common names was in Dutch of course. I know Actinidia kolomikta as a very recognisable variegated climber with pink-tipped leaves and I assumed because of deliciosa that this one was something edible; it gave off a very strong, unusual aroma.  A blackbird having a feast on a piece of fallen fruit solved the puzzle; Kiwi!

The Kiwi Arbour

Probably a lovely shady place to sit in August, but in December’s biting cold I quickly retreated to the Palm House for some welcome warmth. Constructed in 1911, this wooden-framed glasshouse feels very representative of the Victorian age (or whatever the Dutch equivalent of Victoriana is), particularly because of the addition of some beautiful cabinets of curiosities where collectors of those days loved to display their discoveries from their colonial travels. In here were all sorts of idiosyncratic objects such as chain of Cycad seeds from the Philippines, the last Cycad brush, a cycad fossil and a bell jar of gastrolites, (stones from a dinosaurs stomach).

A Cabinet of Curiosities

For a Cycad lover, this is the garden to visit. There are rare and threatened species, some so at risk of extinction that they are kept in locked exhibition cases and from the elevated walkway you can really appreciate their symmetrical beauty. Perhaps because there were very few visitors when I visited, there was a slightly eerie silence in the place. The Cycads grow seem to grow stoically along with the enormous palms and rubber plants, sone of which are the very same specimens planted by de Vries himself, including a Ficus macrophylla and a Ficus lyrate; whilst we are familiar with these as common houseplants today, they would have been exotic to the horticulturalists of a hundred years ago.

Cycads in the Palm House

Some of the oldest trees in Hortus Botanicus include a 350 year old Encephalantos altenstenii and a Cinnamonum burmannii.   There is also a very young Wollemi Pine (Wollemi nobilis) which is now nearly extinct in the wild; the last known specimens were discovered in the Blue Mountains near Sydney by an Australia hiker in 1994 who fortunately must have had some idea that he had stumbled across a rare primitive conifer that had previously only been known by its fossil as his find has now helped protect this very rare conifer.

For such a small botanic garden, there is a good proportion of warm glasshouses to escape the biting Russian wind that swept the flat plains of the Netherlands in December. The Glass Room is an educational space which illustrate plant families, such as a tray of twenty different Haworthias. These are exhibited to exemplify the great number of species within one genus. There is also an explanation of how this garden is responsible for introducing coffee to the Western world as it was here where the Dutch East Indies Company first bought Coffea arabica for cultivation. There are also numerous carnivorous plants, always a good interest point for children, such as Nepenthes ventrata . Indeed the first hardy carnivorous collection I have seen is contained in this garden. This includes Sarracenias, Venus Fly Traps and Sundews, Drosera binata (Fork-leaved Sundew) which I have seen in the mountains of the Lake District.   

In the Butterfly greenhouse you can witness a butterfly emerging from a chrysalis as well as some beautiful species fluttering around and feeding on the nectar of Lychees (litchi sinensis), Bixa Orellana and Tropical wild petunias (Rueillia brevifolia).

In the Butterfly House

Emerging from a chrysalis

The relatively new Three Climate Glasshouse has a Cacti and succulent area, a Temperate zone and a Tropical region. With its concrete walls and maze of walkways through which you meander amongst hanging philodendrons and Platycerium species, (Stag-horn ferns), it reminded me of the lovely Barbican Conservatory in London.

Finally, you can sit in the café, a converted orangery, and enjoy scrolling through the various horticultural books scattered on the tables, whilst eating your Dutch pastries with a warming cup of Coffea arabica.   Hortus Botanicus is well worth a visit, and I really look forward to returning some time, to see how the garden shows off all it’s other wonderful plants in Spring and Summer.