View of villa Hartekamp in Heemstede from the Leiden-Haarlem canal towpath. This villa was once the home of George Clifford, for a while patron of the young botanist Carl Linnaeus. This is the place where Linnaeus stayed for over two years from September 1735 to October 1737, and where he wrote his <i>Hortus Cliffortianus</i>. He had been introduced to Clifford, a wealthy Amsterdam banker, by Herman Boerhaave of Leiden. Linnaeus had come to visit Boerhaave (at that time an old man famous for his work on botany) as Voltaire had done before him. Clifford collected rare plants as a hobby and asked Linnaeus to come to live at his mansion as his physician and superintendent of his garden. Boerhaave had a summer home on the Haarlem-Leiden canal as did Clifford, and they would have traveled to each others' gardens by trekschuit, a popular Dutch narrow boat for passenger traffic. Today little remains of the garden but a few American oaks and pines among the dense woods.
<a href="//commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/User:Jane023" title="User:Jane023">Jane023</a>
2007-01-22
<span class="int-own-work" lang="en">Own work</span>