Anyone visiting Park Clingendael will admire the municipal greenery service of Dutch city The Hague (Den Haag) that maintains this public estate. The park with its almost ancient trees and over twenty species of rhododendrons is looked after exceptionally well. The same goes for the exposition gardens, varying from a typical old Dutch garden to a rosary or a gracious Japanese one.
Especially the latter one, considered by many as the most beautiful and certainly the oldest Japanese garden in Europe, is a major tourist attraction, even for the Japanese visitors. In the tea garden, created around 1900 by baroness Marguerite of Brienen, colourful azalea’s blossom in Spring around a pond with Japanese bridges. Around the azalea’s you’ll find many Asian flora species with red, light green, blue and yellow leafs.
In the old Dutch garden, visitors get an idea of how a baroque garden in 1680 Netherlands will have looked like. A broad stairway leads to a higher level with fourteen graves of the baroness’s little doggies. Next to it stands her wooden tea pavilion.
Park Clingendael also includes a children’s playing field, a little animal park, and an 18th century snake wall, which is one of five left in the country. The estate is reachable with bus line 18 and 23 from The Hague Central Station. Admission is free from dusk till dawn all year round. Only the entrance to the Japanese garden is restricted: from April 30 to mid June from 9 to 20 hours.