Muskauer
Park / Park Mużakowski -- A Painting with Plants.
Added in
UNESCO Heritage Site On July 2, 2004
Manasi
Bandyopadhyay ( née Chakrabarti )
Muskauer
Park / Park Mużakowski , located on the Lusatian Neisse, in the German - Polish border ,
was designed as a ‘painting with plants’
. It is a landscaped park of total 559.9 ha extending across Neisse River and the border between Poland
and Germany . The remaining part of the composition falls within the
surrounding buffer zone of 1,205 ha. Instead of
creating a classical landscapes, local plants were used to
enhance the inherent qualities of the existing landscape. This integrated
landscape extends into the town of Muskau with green passages that formed urban
parks framing areas for development. The town thus became a design component in
a Utopian landscape. The site also features a reconstructed castle, bridges and
an arboretum. The extensive site includes the river Neisse, other water
features, human-made and natural, bridges, buildings, forested areas, and
paths. This park attracts over 2,50,000 visitors every year.
This landscape park is the project of Prince
Hermann Ludwig Heinrich von Pückler-Muskau(30 Oct 1785– 4 February 1871). He was born as Count Pückler, at Muskau Castle in
Upper Lusatia. This interesting
personality of 19th Century is one of the greatest landscape gardening artists of Europe, wrote widely
appreciated books, mostly about his travels in Europe and Northern Africa,
published under the pen name of "Semilasso".
From an article of The Gardener dated 20.2.1999, we know that, he, also known as Prince Pickle in England, and 'the Goethe of landscape gardening', met Goethe in Weimar on
September 14, 1826. They went for a stroll through Goethe's park , and admired
the grotto containing a stone sphinx, a Roman villa, a rose garden and a flight
of stone steps leading to the river, where Christel von Lassberg drowned
herself with a copy of Werther pressed to her breast. Goethe advised his young
friend to pursue his interest in gardens. Nature, he said, offers the best
education, because it can make anyone feel happy.
He visited Stourhead, in
Wiltshire, in 1815 and that was the inspiration behind his first landscape garden in Muskau . He started work on the transformation of 'Muskau Castle'. The
17th-century building, was turned into a stately home, furnished in the English
manner. Servants were dressed in English liveries and wore English wigs. An
'English house' was built, with a bowling green in the garden. A pleasure
ground was laid out, between garden and park. Fields were provided for grazing
sheep, and a village was demolished to make way for an ornamental farm.
Waterfalls were constructed in artificial lakes; clumps of
trees were planted in the style of William Kent and Capability Brown; a
pheasantry took the shape of a Turkish country house; and a Temple of Stability
was erected in memory of the Prussian king Friedrich Wilhelm III.
As the Prince traveled extensively throughout many part of the world, it was easy for him to design the transformation of the entire place. After serving for some time in the Saxon "Garde du Corps" - cavalry regiment at Dresden, he traveled through France and Italy, often by
foot. After
the first world war he retired from the army and visited and stayed England for a year. Then he went back to Germany and married.
He divorced his first wife on 1928 , went to England again and became
something of a celebrity in London society spending nearly two years in search
of a wealthy second wife capable of funding his ambitious gardening schemes. In
1828 his toured to Ireland, notably to
the seat of Daniel O'Connell in Kerry. On his return home he published his enormous successful book - Tour of a
German Prince (1831–32).
The prince described himself as “a slave to moods, willful and
quixotic, today amorous, tomorrow withdrawn…I’m made for travelling just like
the comet.” He subsequently traveled in Algeria, Tunisia, Egypt and visited the site of Naqa and the Musawwarat es-Sufra, in modern Sudan and in both places he carved his name in the stone of the temples. in 1837 ; explored ancient Nubia , north
through Lebanon and on into Turkey. . In the same year, at the slave market of Cairo he purchased an
Ethopian girl in her early teens whom he named Mahbuba (the
beloved). He took her to Asia Minor, Greece, and Vienna, where he
introduced her to European high society, Mahbuba developed tuberculosis and
died in Muskau in 1840. Later he would write that she was "the being I
loved most of all the world."
He then lived in Berlin and at Muskau, where he spent much
time in cultivating and improving the still existing Muskau Park. In 1845 he
sold this estate, and, although he afterwards lived from time to time at
various places in Germany and Italy, his principal residence became Schloss
Branitz near Cottbus, where he laid out another splendid park.
In 2016, the Bundeskunsthalle in Bonn dedicated an exhibition
to the excentric Prince , with the title "Die Gartenlandschaften des
Fürsten Pückler". Two of his gardens are listed on the UNESCO Lists of
World Heritage Sites: one is located in Bad Muskau, the other in Babelsberg
near Potsdam. Both are considered to be highlights of the landscape
architecture of the 19th century.
