Forget-me-not
Leopold II, King of the Belgians between 1865 and 1909, was known as the Builder King. He had a taste for monuments, boulevards and palaces. He is responsible for the Cinquantenaire arch in Brussels, the Royal Museum for Central Africa in Tervuren, the seafront promenade and race track in Ostend and the Antwerp railway station (pre-renovation).
The Royal Greenhouses in Laken – open to the public until May 10 – are both a jewel in the crown of Brussels and a reminder of a tragic past
The property of the Royal Palace of Laken was also greatly renovated during his reign. Here, he oversaw the construction of the Japanese Tower and the Chinese Pavilion and expanded the Royal Greenhouses.
For three weeks every spring, these phenomenal glass buildings are open to the public. They are a marvel of 19th-century architecture that house a stunning collection of plants, many of which are now in bloom. You don’t have to be a gardening enthusiast to be swept away on a scented tidal wave of admiration for the man whose personal fortune made it all possible.
But before you are, it might be worth considering how the Builder King obtained his wealth that enabled the Royal Greenhouses to be expanded and lavishly stocked.
You are not likely to get the answers in the greenhouses. Nowhere could I find a single reference to the fact that Leopold II became rich as a result of a slave labour regime in the Congo Free State. You could spend a whole day in the Royal Greenhouses without being aware that King Leopold II was a brutal, greedy, colonial thug.
The Congo Free State existed from 1885 to 1908. It was not a Belgian colony; it belonged personally to King Leopold II. It was thus the world’s only privately owned colony.
It was a vast region: 26 times the size of Belgium itself and covering one-thirteenth of the African continent. Although Leopold II never set foot in his country, he ruled it from Brussels with an iron rod. His private army – the Force Publique –went from village to village, seizing the women and holding them hostage until their husbands had gone into the rain forest and returned with the necessary quota of rubber. Missionaries reported that beatings, rapes and executions by the Force Publique were the norm rather than the exception.
Not surprisingly, life in the Congo Free State became untenable. Whole tribes fled, fields went unharvested, natives starved to death, and disease swept through the ravaged population. Between 1880 and 1920, the population was decimated by half, from 20 to 10 million.
Meanwhile, the rubber was being shipped back to Belgium and making King Leopold II extremely rich. It was this money that he poured into his building projects.
The Royal Greenhouses existed before the Congo Free State came into being. They were first designed in 1873; the Winter Garden was completed in 1876. But when the riches from the Congo started rolling in, buildings were added: the Congo House in 1886 and the Palm House in 1892.
At the turn of the century, reports began to leak out of the Congo detailing the atrocities. Public outcry eventually led to the annexation of the Congo by Belgium in 1908, for which Leopold was handsomely remunerated.
Leopold died exactly 100 years ago in 1909. At the time of his death, he was living in one of the greenhouse buildings: the Palm Pavilion (not open to the public). Here, on 17 December, aged 74, he died, just five days after marrying the 26-year old prostitute Caroline Lacroix.
Nobody reported on the king’s state of mind on his death bed and whether he had any regrets. For insight, I asked Adam Hochschild, author of the best-selling book King Leopold’s Ghost:
“As to his state of mind when he died, we can only speculate. I would guess that he felt no guilt whatsoever about anything he had done in the Congo. I would guess that he was proud that he had raised Belgium's status in the imperial world by means of this colony and that, most of all, he was satisfied at how rich he had made himself – both through the profits reaped from the rubber system and through the extraordinary arrogance of making Belgium actually agree to buy the Congo from him.”
All this is not to put you off visiting the Royal Greenhouses. Visit them. Enjoy their splendours. Marvel at the architectural triumphs. Gaze in delight at the beautiful plants.
But don’t forget the millions of Congolese who died, directly or indirectly, harvesting the rubber that enabled many of these greenhouses to be built. A nice way to do this is to pay a visit to the temporary exhibition in the greenhouses by the artist Dang of dancing forget-me-nots, the symbol of hope. The objective is to raise awareness of Child Focus, the European centre for missing or sexually exploited children, and its new emergency telephone number: 116000.
The Royal Greenhouses
Koninklijke Parklaan, Brussels
Until 10 May
What’s inside
The seven main buildings of the Royal Greenhouses were constructed by the architect Alphonse Balat in collaboration with his pupil Victor Horta. Looking like a huge glass city, you can walk for a kilometre without going outside, thanks to a network of monumental pavilions, cupolas and wide, covered arcades.
They are the culmination of numerous meetings, letters and plans exchanged between Balat and King Leopold II. They were built entirely of metal and glass, which was a spectacular innovation at the time, and inspired the new Belgian architecture of the day, Art Nouveau. The spectacular Winter Garden is an Art Nouveau jewel and is classed among the greatest greenhouses of the world.
The plant collection is extremely valuable as it includes many rare species. Some of them, most notably the palms in the Palm House and the Congo House, date from Leopold II's original collections.
