Gardens die faster than buildings. A palace can stand empty for a century and still be restored. A garden left for a decade is a field. The gardens of Paleis Het Loo were brought back from exactly that.
William of Orange bought Het Loo in 1684. The formal gardens were designed by Jacob Roman and Daniel Marot in the high Baroque manner: symmetry, water, clipped geometry, a garden as an argument about order. It was among the great gardens of its age.
Fashion then did what fashion does. The Baroque scheme was swept away for an English style landscape garden. What the reconstruction team of the 1980s found was a landscape with a Baroque memory underneath it. For the 1984 anniversary they rebuilt the formal gardens using original documents, and they kept the mature trees that the landscape period had planted. Both centuries were allowed to stand.
The palace restoration ran from 1977 to 1984, and Queen Beatrix opened the museum that resulted. The building closed again in 2018 for asbestos removal, then reopened. Palaces are never finished. They are maintained, in public, forever.
A print of about 1695 shows what the gardeners were aiming at: elegantly dressed figures at the Venus fountain, with colonnades and an obelisk behind them. The Rijksmuseum holds the engraving. The gardeners of the 1980s held the same view, three hundred years later, and rebuilt toward it.
That is garden stewardship at its most honest. Not a frozen moment, but a documented one. The documents said: here was the fountain, here the parterre. The gardeners listened. The garden is back, and it knows exactly what it is.