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It is almost impossible to imagine, but in the 1970s all the greenery behind the building of the Council of State (Paleisstraat) was asphalted. At the time, it provided parking space for the civil servants who had their offices in this building. When the Council of State moved in at this address in 1982, the greenery came back. When the Council of State was redesigned and expanded in 2011, landscape architect Michael van Gessel restored the French design from the 1950s by reintroducing tight, straight lines and symmetry.

Once the garden was much larger. When Crown Prince Willem II and his Russian wife Anna Paulowna lived at Kneuterdijk 22 (1816-1940), the green stretched far beyond the Mauritskade. Their garden was laid out in the English landscape style. The sale of land reduced the park to the city palace garden it is today.

In addition to a Sundial and sixteen sculptures by Eric Claus, the garden also contains a bronze sculpture by Wessel Couzijn. His Sun comes from the Dutch National Collection and was placed there in the early eighties. Couzijn is considered one of the most important innovators of sculpture after the Second World War. During the war years in New York he had become acquainted with the work of sculptors such as Ossip Zadkine (1890-1967) and Jacques Lipchitz (1891-1973). Back in the Netherlands, his work developed from fairly realistic to abstract and expressive. In the fifties and sixties, Couzijn depicted "human events" with dots, scraps and unexpected holes. He did not depict people themselves, but rather their strong emotions. It was not only Couzijn's abstract-expressionist form language that was new. He also experimented with various casting methods. The unusual protrusions in The Sun bear witness to this.