MARTIN KEMP
The Renaissance is an age of discovery, of charting and mapping - the mapping of the human body, the mapping of the immediate outside nature, and the mapping of the distant worlds in a literally global way.
NARRATOR
Exploration was a Renaissance obsession. Voyages of discovery were opening up new worlds - confronting nature that hadn’t only been unknown, but was unimagined. As sailors returned with tales of fabulous new creatures, artists like Durer grappled with the problems of depicting wonders which had only been encountered through hearsay.
MARTIN KEMP
What we see in Albrecht Durer is a reaction to the wonders of this new world which are coming in. Suddenly all sorts of things which had never been seen before made by distant human beings and made by distant nature, and there was this sense of wonder. And you needed to re-classify nature, you needed to re-order it, you needed to get a grip on this.
Probably, the most famous of these exotic things that Durer portrayed is the rhinoceros. Now he did this on the basis of somebody else's description, and he produces this wonderful rhinoceros, in a sense it's more rhinoceros than a rhinoceros because, it's full of this armour. It's better than the real thing!
But the scientific investigations also uncovered some bigger surprises that questioned the very essence of the painting.
NARRATOR
But for botanists like Clusius there was no need to imagine the wonders of the new world. Explorers like Francis Drake returned to Europe with ships packed with newly discovered plants which were propagated and bartered across Europe.
 CLAUDIA SWAN
It's difficult to imagine that objects like more or less everyday objects like, the tulip, the potato, spices from cloves to vanilla, were totally unknown, and considered wonders when they were first brought back to and cultivated in the old world.
 CARLA TEUNE Clusius was the man who introduced the tulips in this part of Europe. Tulips had already been seen a little bit earlier, and we are sure that Clusius had seen pictures of Tulips. And as a real plant lover, collector, well you could say stamp collector almost, he wanted to have that plant.
CLAUDIA SWAN
We know that Carolus Clusius had tulips stolen from his garden over and over again. And friends offered to lend their guard dogs. People wrote to Clusius and begged him begged him, offered him cases of Sevillean oranges, all kinds of actually more or less equally exotic items, for a single tulip bulb.
NARRATOR
The new knowledge was spread by a new technology - the printed book. Throughout his career Clusius published catalogues describing the many exotic plants imported from distant continents. Every voyage re-charted the boundaries of human experience.
Claudia turned to these books in search of more clues. How might Clusius have come to own the watercolours? How did they relate to his published illustrations? And how close were they to the cutting edge of botanical science? But the books only deepened the mystery.
CLAUDIA SWAN
The wood cuts in Carolus Clusius's botanical publication do not correspond with the water colours in Krakow to the extent that it would be possible to say that Clusius had used these water colours for his published work. In and of itself that's pretty shocking if Clusius was the owner of these water colours. what they owned as much about what they would like to be seen to own.
Why, would you own, why would you go to the expense and the trouble of commissioning upwards of eighteen hundred water colours, and then not use them in your heavily illustrated publications? It doesn't make sense!
Carolus Clusius is also tied into a vast network of correspondence, is himself a very distinguished correspondent in the world of science at the end of the sixteenth century. And in all of the published letters by Carolus Clusius there is not a single mention of his owning a collection of water colours that could correspond to those in Krakow.
NARRATOR
So the origin of the Winter Garden was still a mystery. It was almost certain that Clusius hadn’t seen the pictures before he arrived in Leiden. So where had they come from? The breakthrough came as Claudia searched through Clusius’ letters. A sentence leapt out at her.
CLAUDIA SWAN
A collection of water colours that corresponds to those in Krakow, does come up in Carolus Clusius's correspondence. But, he's talking about somebody else, and he's talking about, the widow of a pharmacist.
 CARLA TEUNE
Although Carolus Clusius was the man who inspired this garden, it was another very famous man, an apothecary from Delft, Dirck Outgaertszon Klout who was the man who actually dug and planted the plants.
He was asked to become the director of the garden, but he had no academic education, so this young university said he was not good enough. But when Clusius came, and when he couldn’t work in the garden, they asked Mr Klout again to become the head gardener - what you call the curator or, in Latin, the hortulanus.
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