Muskau Park is Germany’s foremost landscape garden and the magnificent creation of Prince Pückler-Muskau. The aristocrat moved mountains, dug lakes and planted hundreds of thousands of trees in his romantic refuge.
Bad Muskau lies on the eastern border of Germany, separated from Poland by the river Neisse. It was here between 1815 and 1845 that the brilliant and eccentric Prince Hermann von Pückler- Muskau created probably the most significant landscape park outside England, the homeland of this garden speciality, transforming his property – “a desert of kinds where only wolves, wild boar, peasants and dunces roamed” – into a wonderland. Today, thousands of tourists come from all over the world to visit the gardens he cultivated on 830 hectares of land. A narrow road leads from the town’s unimposing market square to the park. It is an entrance to paradise, to a world apart. Visitors stroll past the Old Palace, a bulky but harmonious baroque gatehouse, to find themselves at the edge of a sea of the most varied tones of mottled green. As far as the eye can see, gently rolling lawns spread out, dotted with ancient, giant trees that give the park a melancholy, timeless feel; broad gravelled paths lead around a placid, almost black lake to the New Palace. Not just the town, but also everyday life seems far away. At the same time, there is something unsettling about the panorama: Is it wild natural growth or the genius of a competent gardener? Art or nature? “The perfection of landscape art,” Pückler wrote in his book Hints on Landscape Gardening, “is reached only in the region where it again appears to be untrammelled Nature, but in her noblest manifestation.”
It is probably this game of deception that makes Pückler’s rather sombre park so fascinating. He arranged nature much like on a stage: in the foreground solitary trees with widespread branches, mostly beech, oaks, and basswood; on the horizon, islands of elm trees with mighty crowns in steady motion; in between, irregular groups of trees like moorings in the green sea of the meadow, bordered by thick bushes, and dotted here and there with ironic exclamation marks, such as the three high black poplars in the palace garden. The trees once stood on an island in the river Neisse, it is said. Pückler brought them here using powerful transplanting machines. The more recent trees were planted in 1985. “Certainly, single groups of trees planted on a lawn and appropriately distributed, emerging from the green of the grass like an island, have a much more gracious and picturesque effect than clumps, that look like they sound, clumsy and ungainly,” the prince suggests.
Through the shady green of the meadows and trees flows the “Hermannsneisse,” a stream that Pückler branched off from the Neisse to create an artificial waterscape of lakes, ponds and rapids and to satisfy his passion for bridges. Ten of these are distributed throughout the park, six alone in the immediate vicinity of the palace. From the Karpfen bridge to the Eichsee bridge and the Fuchsia bridge, they all demonstrate the playful architecture of a man who loved transforming everything around him into poetry, but had an eye for the technical side of things, too.

His interest went as far as working out the drafts for the substructure of his broad gravel garden paths. They meander through the park, following neither a geometrical nor artificial pattern, but the shape of the land. As for his plants, trees, meadows and waterways, Pückler also wrote down textbook instructions for shaping paths in his Hints on Landscape Gardening. Here, he specified that “the roads and paths should not run in continual curves like a serpent wound round a stick, but should rather make such bends as serve a definite purpose easily and effectively,
following as far as possible the contours of the ground. Certain aesthetic rules dictate these bends in themselves, and hence in places obstacles must be set up where they do not naturally occur in order to make the graceful line appear natural.” More than other details of the park, visitors can be certain that the paths are original features leading to the highlights of the park. Pückler proposed three tours of different lengths through his park and the most recent guide still follows these faithfully. Whereas the prince used a special garden carriage for his tours, estimating that it would take eight days to study the grounds intensively, including all the paths, the present-day park guide proposes four hours on foot. The idea of turning his home wasteland into a Garden of Eden came to Pückler on two journeys to England, where he not only visited the most important English parks, but also closely studied the art of English garden design. He sketched pleasure grounds, measured paths, examined the mystery of the legendary British lawn and learned the tricks needed to successfully transplant even older trees. He virtually memorised the bestselling book Observations on the Theory and Practice of Landscape Gardening by the great landscape architect Humphrey Repton. Pückler later invited Repton’s son to plan the lawn in front of the New Palace. Back in Germany, he mentioned in the introduction to “Hints” why England would remain for him an unattainable role model, compared to the “continental squalor and dirt”. Near disgust, he summarizes: “Must we not be filled with a real sense of shame when we look for a counterpart here and still find the greater part of our country seats whose chief view looks on the manure heap, at whose gates for the greater part of the day swine and geese disport themselves.” Pückler first started writing the book with the intention of promoting himself as a gardener. It was to become a kind of bible, not only in Germany: His friend Heinrich Heine organised a French edition and the Reptons an English one. The book was held in high esteem in the professional world. Today, the extensive work serves as documentation for preservationists of historic sites, landscape gardeners and Pückler historians, and at the same time offers a detailed description of Muskau Park. But the stately gardener loved his visions more than reality. Lacking any reasonable planning sense and without giving a thought to the horrendous debts he was incurring, he began to expand his park in the 1840s to the scope laid out in his “Hints” – by 350 hectares to a gargantuan 750 hectares in size. It was the climax of an unfinished symphony. But in 1845 when his accounting books revealed that Muskau had debts amounting to 1.7 million thalers, of which a million had been spent on the still unfinished park, Pückler capitulated. He was forced to accept that his park would be completed by future generations. Muskau had to be sold. Through noble front men, the estate was bought by an admirer of Pückler, Prince Frederick of the Netherlands. This was lucky for Muskau, because the royal park enthusiast kept on Pückler’s associate, park inspector Jacob Heinrich Rehder, and even commissioned him to carry on expanding the park. Rehder was succeeded in 1852 by Eduard Petzold, who oversaw the maintenance and development of the park according to Pückler’s principles. Early on, Petzold had been responsible for founding an educational institution for gardeners based on Pückler’s Hints on Landscape Gardening. Today it still exists as the “Muskau School” and is housed in a wing of the New Palace.

Gardening historians today agree that the park attained perfection under Petzold, a perfection that the Second World War destroyed. In 1945, the front ran straight through the park and large sections were damaged by artillery fire. After the war, Poland placed those parts of the park on its side of the Neisse under conservation. Left untended, they quickly became overgrown. It is only now that glimpses of Pückler’s aesthetic intentions are gradually becoming apparent again on the Polish side of the park. Since 2004, a new double bridge has connected the two sides of the park via an island. But in other ways, too, Poland and Germany have discovered that the park is indivisible and have started sharing responsibility for it. In 1993, the “Prince Pückler Park Bad Muskau Foundation” was established with the goal of restoring Muskau Park, modelled on the original plans and based on cooperation. And the prince’s family? On the day Muskau was sold, Pückler is said to have saddled his fastest horse and ridden around his creation. He then sped off at a full gallop, without looking back, according to Pückler’s biographer Paul Ortwin Rave. The advisory board of the Pückler Foundation boasts not only international members from England and Poland, but also the Munich businessman, Count Hermann von Pückler. The prince’s great nephew is responsible for the maintenance of Muskau Park as well as nearby Branitz Castle in Brandenburg, the family seat of the Pücklers. Today, he occasionally resides in the former park inspector’s house, which he bought and restored. Pückler the businessman has inherited his ancestor’s green thumb: Like the prince, he is a passionate lover of forests and owns some 1,000 hectares of trees. He is working on a kind of “forest bridge” that in the distant future will connect Muskau with Branitz, 50 kilometres away. Woodland owners always think in generations. Count Pückler is not lord of an estate, but he is lord of numerous books and documents that belonged to his famous ancestor. His contribution of rarities, pictures and certificates made the impressive Pückler exhibition “Pückler! Pückler? Simply Unbelievable!” in the New Palace an event not to be missed. Throughout the world, Prince Pückler is still honoured as a brilliant
park planner. Three of his landscape gardens – Muskau, Ettersberg near Weimar and Babelsberg – are now UNESCO World Heritage Sites. On their vast lawns and under the many thousands of trees that were planted according to Pückler’s plans, visitors can let their fantasies roam. As art historian Norbert Eisold writes, “Large parts of Muskau Park will always remain a utopian vision. Indeed, the fact that Muskau Park can only reach perfection in the mind of the observer is now the most singular characteristic of the park.” The prince himself saw Muskau Park as his life’s work: “Those who have seen Muskau have seen into my heart,” he wrote in 1833.

Nicolaus Neumann/MERIAN