Jan Kops

On the death of his father in December 1773, Jan Kops with his stepmother and sister moved from Amsterdam to Haarlem, where he received tuition first at the French and then at the Latin school.

In December 1781 Kops enrolled at the Amsterdam Theological Seminary, a move which was not his first choice, as he would rather have followed his interest in botany and natural history, but understood that these were not lucrative fields.

In April 1787 Kops passed his examination at the Anabaptist seminary and served as pastor at Leiden until 1800, enrolling at the local university for a number of courses.

The Batavian Revolution led to the Mennonites' being placed on equal footing with the Dutch Reformed Church, and in 1795 and 1796 he was a member and chairman of Leiden's local authority.

His reputation as agronomist firmly established by the report, he was appointed in June 1800 as director of agriculture in the Netherlands, causing him to leave the ministry in Leiden and take up an office at The Hague, a post he was to fill until 1815.

Most of the illustrations in the first three volumes were from the hand of (Georg Jacob Johann van Os), a flower and fruit painter for the Sèvres porcelain factory.

She was the daughter of a Mennonite textile merchant and after the death of her first husband she bought a country estate on the Vecht River in Loenen and named it Vijverhof.

A procession of artists, including Maria Sibylla Merian, visited her home and left behind a large number of paintings of flowers from her garden.