Erik de Jong, born in Wageningen, the Netherlands, in 1954. Ph.D. from the University of Groningen. Lecturer in Architectural History at the VU University, Amsterdam.
Fellow (1 September 1996 – 30 June 1997)
The fruits of a paradisiacal stay at NIAS are manyfold. The quietness of house and garden brings about concentration and this in turn leads to inspiration and the development of thoughts and ideas. It is only befitting for one who worked on a book on Dutch garden- and landscape-architecture from 1600 to the present day, to discover the truth of what the philosopher Lipsius wrote of his Leyden garden in 1584: that it is a place of the Muses and the training school of one’s wisdom. I succeeded in coming to terms with a vast and in many ways unknown subject. By grouping material on the late 16th, the 17th, the late 18th and early 19th and part of the 20th centuries, I was able to put a foundation to the first version of chapters on 1. The Genius Loci; 2. Concepts of Nature and Art; 3. The Collecting and the Presentation of Nature; 4. From Amateur to Professional; 5. Designing the Land; 6. Designing the City; 7. Paradisus Batavus overseas.
Other areas have been researched, yet remain to be written; picture research, part of my original objectives, also remains to be done. Yet the larger lines of the design for the book are there, with here and there open spaces still to be filled in and some replanting and pruning and shaping to do when the totality of the design comes further into fruition.