Prussian Gardens

For the first time, texts and photographs present an overall view of all the Prussian gardens and parks in Berlin, Potsdam and elsewhere in Brandenburg created under the Hohenzollerns over a period of more than three centuries. Only the cross-genre collaborative effort of garden designers, gardeners, architects, scenographers, sculptors, painters, and creative rulers, made it possible to turn the environs of Berlin and Potsdam […] step by step into a garden«, as Frederick William IV put it in 1840. Figures such as David Garmatter, Friedrich Christian Glume, Siméon Godeau, Georg Wenzeslaus von Knobelsdorff, Peter Joseph Lenné, Antoine Pesne, Prince Hermann von Pückler-Muskau, Georg Potente, Karl Friedrich Schinkel, the Sello brothers, and Antoine Watteau – picked artistic forces that created the Prussian garden realm. The present volume is an attempt to approach the ideas forming the basis of the high standard of princely landscape art.

The Prussian gardens in Berlin, Potsdam and elsewhere in Brandenburg: for the first time, texts and photographs present an overall view of all the gardens and parks created under the Hohenzollerns over a period of more than three centuries. Only the cross-genre collaborative effort of garden designers, gardeners, architects, scenographers, sculptors, painters, and creative rulers, the most prominent of whom were Frederick II and Frederick William IV, made it possible "to turn the environs of Berlin and Potsdam step by step into a garden", as Frederick William IV put it in 1840. Figures such as David Garmatter, Friedrich Christian Glume, Siméon Godeau, Georg Wenzeslaus von Knobelsdorff, Peter Joseph Lenné, Antoine Pesne, Prince Hermann von Pückler-Muskau, Georg Potente, Karl Friedrich Schinkel, the Sello brothers, and Antoine Watteau -- picked from a whole cornucopia of names -- indicate the spectrum of artistic forces that created the Prussian garden realm. Impatient with his royal client, who had once again cut his funding, Lenné alluded to the high standard of princely landscape art: "Your Majesty still does not understand how ingenious my idea is". The present volume is an attempt to examine the "ingeniousness of the idea" specifically inherent in the gardens of the Hohenzollerns in Prussia.