In the year 2000 the management of the Hofwijck garden is returned to the owner, the Hofwijck Association, by the municipal parks department of Voorburg. At that time the Association asks itself how the museal character of the garden could be strengthened so that the garden would become a fully-fledged outdoor museum. The board decides to appoint a hortulanus, a garden manager, just as Huygens already had working for him. By appointing the hortulanus of the Muiderslot as hortulanus of Hofwijck in November 2001, Hofwijck has acquired an official specialized in seventeenth-century gardens.

The beginning of the reconstruction

Shortly afterwards it was decided to aim for a total reconstruction of Constantijn Huygens's gardens as he laid them out around 1640. Through a garden archaeological survey it soon becomes clear that no traces of the soil from the earlier layout were still present. During the past fifty years the soil archive of Hofwijck had been almost completely destroyed. With the construction of through pipeline routes for gas, electricity and data cables, the islands on both sides of the house, as well as the forecourt, had been completely dug up. The same applied to the orchard, which was also excavated to a great depth during the 1987 garden construction.

In drawing up the plans, a difficult choice has to be made between ‘restoration’ or ‘reconstruction’. Restoration would mean that all elements of the garden would return in exactly the same form and in the same place as in Huygens's time. This proves to be virtually impossible, due to all the changes that had taken place over the centuries. So the decision is made to reconstruct the garden as closely as possible to its original form by, for example, restoring the correlated measurement proportions within a changed setting. The original basic dimensions had been preserved in the house. In 2003 the restoration work is started and completed in the spring of 2004. A working group consisting of various disciplines succeeds, together with the hortulanus and landscaping firm Van der Tol, in restoring the remaining part of Huygens's garden to its original state. Hedges and rows of trees are bringing back the contours of the human body.