Historic greenhouses of the Westlands Museum (Westlands Museum voor Streek- en Tuinbouwhistorie)

The garden grew out of a long-held ambition of the Stichting Tuinbouwhistorie, a foundation set up in 1970. At that time Westland horticulture was modernising fast: old businesses were demolished, new roads laid and the navigable ditches filled in, so that much of the region's heritage was at risk of vanishing. The foundation began collecting old tools and materials, aiming to run a garden that would keep earlier crops, buildings and growing methods alive.

A holding in Honselersdijk with an eighteenth-century grower's house and several old greenhouses was the first choice, but its purchase could not be financed. In 1971 a second scheme, linked to a nature garden planned by The Hague at Madestein, produced in 1973 a design for a two-hectare garden; it too foundered for lack of funds. A horticultural museum nonetheless opened in 1980 in the Cruisbrouck farmhouse at Naaldwijk.

In 1991 that museum merged with the Westland regional museum, founded in 1908, and the regional history centre set up in 1976. The new institution bought a farmhouse with about a hectare of land on the Middel Broekweg; the museum opened in 1993 and the historic garden two years later. A lean-to grape house rebuilt in 1994 was restored in 2012 with help from local firms.

The greenhouses are not replicas: they were rebuilt from original components gathered from sites across the Westland where old structures had to make way for modernisation or housing. They are arranged among garden or grape walls and several types of glasshouse.

The oldest family is the lean-to, built against a wall that usually faces south, with a sloping glazed face made of sashes. Cheap to build, these houses store heat well and can work without heating. The garden shows several variants, including the 'gebroken lessenaar' with a broken roof line and the 'kopkas', in which the glass rises one pane above the top of the wall, an improvement on the earliest lean-tos whose glazing stopped at the coping. This kopkas with timber glazing bars, rebuilt in 1994, received new bars and a largely renewed glass roof in 2012.

Alongside stand free-standing houses, among them an iron grape house with a broken roof, known as a 'kniekas', as well as a 'raamwarenhuis' built of sashes, and a chimney.

The garden recreates a Westland holding as it worked before the age of vast glass complexes. Fruit, vegetables and flowers are grown in the old way by volunteers who tend it every day; vines under glass recall the grape growing long characteristic of the region, alongside a fruit wall, tulips and a corner of culinary and medicinal herbs. Some of the seasonal harvest is sold in the museum shop.

Inside, the museum traces the history of the Westland and its horticulture from Roman times to the present, including how the produce auctions worked. A set of seven scale models shows the region's characteristic glasshouses and frames: single and double frames, a broken-roof lean-to, a kopkas, a cucumber house, an A-frame house, a grape house and a 'warenhuis'.

The museum occupies an old farmhouse, a municipal monument, on the Middel Broekweg in Honselersdijk, with the garden behind it. An hour and a half to two hours allows time for the galleries and a walk among the greenhouses and fruit walls; the growing season, when crops are in place, is the most rewarding time. The visit gains meaning against today's Westland landscape, covered with modern production glasshouses, which shows how far the scale has changed. The seven models in the museum help to identify the greenhouse types before heading out into the garden.