To venture moonstruck across the frost-silvered
lawns of the Parc de Wespelaar, near
Brussels, was to enter a fantasy landscape by the painter Hubert Robert.
Leonard Artois, the Louvain brewer who bought Wespelaar in 1796, may well have
had such romantic moonlit promenades in mind when he asked Ghislain-Joseph
Henri to design a fashionable jardin
anglais for his new estate. By the year 1800, Henri's Temple of Flora and
most of the other fanciful structures were in place, focal points for
nocturnal, or diurnal, wanderings.
The contemporary visitor was tempted to conjure up phantom figures in elegant harmony with the setting. Consider
a nineteenth-century guide to the garden: a Chinese pavilion, a wheel of
fortune, swings, a Chinese bridge, a cascade, sculptures and grotto.
The pavilion and bridge, the
wheel of fortune, and all the other architectural caprices made of perishable
wood and plaster, vanished long ago, as did the original eighteenth-century
manor house.
The chateau that preceded it, a
flamboyant neo-Renaissance pile, was built in the 1880s. The face of the
architect, Hendrik Beyaert, is on our Belgian hundred-franc bill. The major vestige of Beyaert's extravaganza was
the stone balustrade surrounding the island on which the chateau once stood.
A minor vestige was the wrought-iron Art Nouveau balustrade, which he
superimposed on the eighteenth-century Doric columns of the North Bridge. The
bridge formed a gateway to the park as it existed in the mid-eighteenth
century-it was formal then, and entirely surrounded by a pentagonal waterway.
The picturesque landscape was introduced by Henri, who wooded them with beech, elm,
oak, linden and plane trees.
Plenty of earth to shape the new garden was
available after the artificial lake was dug, swallowing up one side of the
pentagon. In the 1880s, the lake was enlarged, much of Henri's planting
uprooted, and the Chinese bridge-undoubtedly in a state of decay-demolished,
all to provide an even more grandiose vista, with a backward nod to the English
landscape designs of William Kent and Capability Brown.
In Wespelaar's
nineteenth-century heyday, visitors were subjected to a variety of fun-house
surprises. There was, for example, the crossing of the Styx in Charon's boat. The
voyage began in Henri's lakeside grotto.
Modern Wespelaar displayed a similar
mingling of good humor and elegance, reflecting to some extent the attitudes of
Leonard Artois and proprietors of other romantic gardens. Such gardens were an
expression of the eighteenth-century preoccupation with man's place in nature.
Today the Aboretum Wespelaar injects
its own special variety of energy and creativity into preserving a portion of Parc de Wespelaar ensuring that it will
long abound with life, as well as with eighteenth-century beauty.
