“I eat, I give away, there can still be left over”

Going to the Ockenburgh estate to view the gardens feels like a home game. As soon as I enter the long driveway, the memory of the annual walk with the grandparents, which had to take place when the rhododendrons were in bloom, overwhelms me.

As a child I had no appreciation for that long, long lime tree avenue. No interest at all in the fact that the three sight axes are one of the few remnants of the seventeenth-century Renaissance garden. That Jacob Westerbaen, a doctor, had built a pleasure garden at these dunes, where the spirit grounds were good soil for fruit trees.

I just found the avenue very long, my interest was in the contents of the picnic in my mother’s panniers. We ignored the white building that shimmered through the trees, which was a youth hostel where hundreds of holidaymakers stayed every year.

Today Villa Ockenburgh is my goal, three women are waiting for me there: vegetable garden coordinator Willy Vredenbregt, hostess Willemijn Nicolaas and regular visitor Dicky Knoester. They greet me in three-part Hague dialect.

“Welcome to Ockenburgh! We can sit by the greenhouse and answer all your questions there,” says the hostess in what my children call queenly Dutch. “The villa has a restaurant and a large terrace, but the greenhouse is next to the vegetable garden.”

“Every Monday,” says the vegetable garden coordinator in the spicy sounds that Harry Jekkers has patented, but which my grandfather and uncles gave away for free on birthdays, “is the café in the greenhouse closed to visitors, then it is for us, the volunteers .”

“And there are movie nights, lectures and concerts in the villa.” In the third speaker I recognize my mother’s family, a kind of soft Hague, recognizable but not as characteristic as the other two outliers. Anyway, I came to talk about the gardens and not be distracted by the local dialects.

That ‘local’ is the theme of this estate is evident from everything they say, as we walk from the villa to the garden. The terrace is full. Next to the field are go-karts that the children race around in. I would have liked that too, instead of trudging after my brother who wanted to search for the bunkers in the dusty nettle bushes. “The villa was completely dilapidated when the youth hostel closed its doors in 1998,” says the hostess. “The municipality did not know what to do with the place. The park and the house deteriorated, the blackberries grew into the building.”

“There was something there, but it didn’t look like anything,” the visitor clarifies.

“It was a huge mess,” the vegetable garden coordinator summarizes in his Jekkers.

Heavily damaged area

The twentieth century has not been easy for the estate. The last private owner left, after that it became the plaything of world events. In the First World War, 1,500 Belgian soldiers were interned there, in the thirties it was a shelter for Jewish children and in May 1940 there were fierce battles. Park and villa were taken over by German troops, who laid a minefield and launched V2 rockets towards London and Antwerp. As a result, the estate became a target of the Allies.

It was a heavily damaged area that had to be given a destination after the war. The municipality became the owner and opened the villa as a youth hostel. When this ended in the late 1990s, decline began. It became a gloomy place full of litter. The municipality dreaded the costs of the restoration and tried to sell it.

As Albert Einstein said, “We cannot solve our problems by thinking the same way we created them.” And so it was not in a meeting room of the municipality or the office garden of a project developer where the feasible plan for Landgoed Ockenburgh was born, but at a kitchen table.

“Three women,” recalls the hostess, “came together when they heard that there was a buyer who wanted to demolish the villa to build a luxury resort, closing the park to the general public. They didn’t want that to happen.”

They wrote a plan based on the following principles: respecting nature, allowing history to live on, connecting people by inviting them to participate, guaranteeing sustainability in future plans. With the slogan: ‘There is more to earn than just money.’ They got the neighborhood on board, sponsors, the municipality and a lot of volunteers.

It sounds like a fairytale and it is, because right in front of me the villa is shining white between the trees and the paths are filled with walkers, joggers and children racing on their tricycles.

The vegetable garden coordinator takes over the story: “Under the leadership of a contractor, volunteers renovated the villa, people from the neighborhood adopted steps and window frames. Then we started working in the garden. Arina Keijzer made the design based on old prints and research that was done into the original garden.”

It is striking that this garden in particular has taken a wonderful turn of fate, because the same thing happened to its founder, Jacob Westerbaen (1599-1670). This son of a rope maker received a scholarship to study theology, but had to stop his studies due to the fierce battle between the Protestant denominations. He became a doctor and continued to dislike religious fanaticism throughout his life. Fate was in his favor: one of his patients, the wealthy heiress Anna Weytsen, was so charmed by the young doctor that she kept calling him to her bedside. Her family was not very impressed by a man ten years her junior with no fortune, but Anna apparently didn’t care because they got married.

Carrot bellies

Suddenly Westerbaen was not only a learned man, but also well-to-do – and that asked for a country estate in the seventeenth century. His literary friend Jacob Cats chose a site on the Scheveningse Weg and another, Constantijn Huygens, had Hofwijck built in Voorburg.

In 1648, the idiosyncratic Westerbaen laid out the Ockenburgh estate in the wild dune grounds near Loosduinen. To celebrate this purchase, he received poems from his friends that he bundled in the booklet Arctoa Tempe: Ockenburgha poetry album for learned gentlemen.

The contributions show how important gardens were in the culture of the time, but also how different in nature these poets were. For Cats, every tree was a reason for a moral lesson, Huygens went for philosophy and Westerbaen saw the humor in it. He managed to rhyme his pride in his carrots with erudite self-mockery:

Carrot bellies were called the farmers of this region. Roots grew well in the clay soil, which was improved with sand. And the farmers thought that if they rinsed the carrots, they could get a better price for it on the market from the clean Dutch housewives. So they lay on their stomachs next to the ditch washing carrots.

An impulse for horticulture was the arrival of the stadtholder, who had Huis Honselaarsdijk built in 1621. Frederik Hendrik went for the latest developments in the field of ornamental and fruit cultivation in his gardens. Local gardeners were hired and learned the art of leading fruit along walls and growing grapes, peaches, apricots. The stadtholder had the Loosduinse Vaart dug in order to have the proceeds from his garden transported to the court in The Hague. This opened up the market in The Hague for the Westlander and then small farmers also started horticulture.

It was the jovial whiner Westerbaen who took his garden most seriously. He lived there all year round and threw himself into gardening with enormous enthusiasm. With childish delight, he notes that his crops are bearing great fruit:

He studied fruit varieties that did well in the mild maritime climate and pioneered crop breeding. Satisfied, he wrote:

That abundance is back at Ockenburgh, to satisfy volunteers and guests with fruit and vegetables. The visitor says that she has adopted a cherry tree in the garden. We walk towards it past the fragrant mint and the ripe strawberries. “Will you come and pick it empty in the summer?” I ask, but that unleashes a storm of protest from The Hague. No! The garden belongs to everyone, no private picking, no forbidden fruits here. Or?

“We received the greenhouse from the Westland.”

“Those men also keep coming to donate seed.”

I choke on a strawberry. But the ladies don’t budge. They just keep going: “We like that very much. All that interest and commitment.” We laugh together, standing in a garden of the past planted very firmly in the present. In many ways.

Illustration Sophia of the Mars