Schoonoord Historical Garden

The Schoonoord historical garden is a beautiful time capsule of an early 19th-century private garden.

The area of the park stems back to the 17th-century when it was a regularly flooding meadow full of tall grass and rodents. This was generally not liked by the people who lived there and in the early 18th century the place was reclaimed from the water. This resulted in a beautiful piece of land that quickly got surrounded by villas and mansions creating a large private garden. 

This garden was often re-decorated to the then current styles and fashions, having teahouses, gazebos and the like. It wasn’t until the 1920s when the then current owners reshaped it into a garden along the English style and left it at that. 

The garden stayed in private hands until 1973 when the family decided to open it to the public. A bridge was built and the old manor gate was put on the bridge. This made the park hard to spot as a public place and it still is to this day only known by the locals. There are over 1000 plant species at the garden and it became a national monument in 2000.