Grounds

Few would have recognized, before 1996, in the weed-covered wilderness cut off from the road by a wall, the once-beautiful grounds of the Herrenhaus. All the more delightfully surprising, then, were the results of the investigations carried out in the mid-1990’s with a view to the preservation of the garden memorials. They revealed that, beneath a layer of rubble and undergrowth, the original landscaped grounds of the Herrenhaus, the surfaces of its paths and its flower-beds, had survived almost intact.

To plans by the landscape architect Prof. Gustav Lange and with exact regard to the original design, the cour d’honneur was constructed anew. The new design’s pièce de résistance is a fountain, likewise modelled on an historical original, directly in front of the main doors. A film of water flows over a swung sandstone balustrade into a basin below.

Box-tree hedges, disposed in strict geometrical patterns, form a kind of carpet dividing the decorative surface of the cour d’honneur into rectangular sub-sections. In the middle of each of these sub-sections stands, on a sandstone plinth, a large terracotta vase with blue hortensia shrubs in bloom. In autumn, the hortensias are replaced by Japanese azaleas.

Instead of the wall which, in the period after the Second World War, cut off the view of the cour d’honneur from the Leipziger Straße there has been constructed, on granite pedestals which have happily survived, a simple, open arrangement of low stone barrier and gate. On the pavement along the Leipziger Straße runs a reconstructed black and white mosaic of small paving-stones.

A special story is attached to two yew trees which once grew in the southern section of the grounds. Theodor Fontane describes, in his Wanderungen durch die Mark Brandenburg (Journeys Through Brandenburg County), a spirited attempt to have the yew trees included – in view of the fact that Friedrich Wilhelm IV had climbed on them as a boy – in the plans made in 1851 for the extension to the Baroque townhouse. This attempt, indeed, initially met with success. But when the Herrenhaus was rebuilt the trees were replanted elsewhere and in the period after 1932 were completely forgotten about. The new planting of the Bundesrat gardens is to involve a commemoration of the famous yew trees.