Nature and Ideology: Natural Garden Design in ... - Dumbarton Oaks

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“TEUTONIC” TRENDS 4. Illustration from Friedrich Ludwig von Sckell’s book Beiträge zur bildenden Gartenkunst für angehende Gartenkünstler und Gartenliebhaber, Munich, 1818 (photo: Dumbarton Oaks) traditions. Beginning with Roman influence some two thousand years ago, Germanic culture and race since then were considered to have been weakened and influenced negatively by foreign peoples or races. German culture therefore had to go back to those times of alleged racial purity. Ideas about nature and the history of the nation became intertwined in the thinking of the people who wanted to prove the superiority of the Germanic people. Nature and history melted together; the Teutonic people were seen as living in close harmony with nature. Related ideas also influenced garden design. Herder and other German intellectuals disseminated the idea of an organic unity between landscape and German history. In this sense, in 1818 the garden artist Friedrich Ludwig von Sckell (1750–1823), in his famous book Contributions to an Instructive Garden Art for Incipient Garden Artists and Garden Enthusiasts (Beiträge zur bildenden Gartenkunst für angehende Gartenkünstler und Gartenliebhaber), called for the use of “patriotic species” of trees and shrubs for particular places, 6 “for plantings of ‘patriotic character,’” for “simplicity,” and for “patriotic pictures” 7 (Fig. 4). Similarly, Alexander von Humboldt (1769–1859) influenced later concepts of natural garden design. In his Ideas for a Physiognomy of Plants (Ideen zu einer Physiognomik der Gewächse), published in 1806, Humboldt referred to “patriotic plant characters” (“vaterländische Pflanzengestalten”) 8 and addressed the decisive impact exercised by the vegetation of a country on the development of individual cultures. According to Humboldt, “the knowledge of the 6 Cf. F. L. von Sckell, Beiträge zur bildenden Gartenkunst für angehende Gartenkünstler und Gartenliebhaber, reprint of 2nd ed., 1825, Worms, 1982, 197; see also pp. 130 and 226. 7 Cf. Lipp, Natur, Geschichte, Denkmal, 264. 8 A. von Humboldt, Ideen zu einer Physiognomik der Gewächse, Tübingen, 1806, 14. 191
JOACHIM WOLSCHKE-BULMAHN natural character of different regions of the earth [is] most intimately connected with the history of the human race and with its culture.” 9 “The character of a people, gloomy or happy mood of humankind,” Humboldt argued, was “mainly dependent on climatic conditions. . . . The poetic work of the Greeks and the harsher singing of the Nordic primitive people owe their peculiar character in large part to the form of plants and animals, to the mountain valleys by which the poet was surrounded and to the air that blew around him.” 10 Thus in Humboldt’s philosophy the outer appearance of plants, their physiognomy, gained considerable importance; he assumed that it could influence even the character of a people. Humboldt’s ideas about the physiognomy of plants later greatly influenced Willy Lange’s (1864– 1941) concept of natural garden design, which was based on the doctrine of plant physiognomy. 11 Lange was the most important promoter of natural garden design in Germany in the early twentieth century. For him natural garden design was determined not so much by ecology but by the physiognomical appearance of plants. In his concepts of natural garden design, one goal was to use foreign plants that physiognomically fit with the indigenous plant associations in order to heighten and improve the beauty of nature by artistic means. 12 Before Lange’s time, around the turn of the eighteenth to the nineteenth century, the search for national identity was more-or-less progressive in character. The longing for national unification was the main driving force, not, as in the early twentieth century, the claim for world power. Intellectuals such as Justus Möser (1720–94) “envisioned a state in which each individual would feel responsible for the workings of the whole, everyone would feel volkish, Germanic, or Teutonic and the fatherland would become the object of universal love—in short, one with which the common ‘peasant’ and the common ‘artisan’ could also identify. Therefore, their political utopia was not a constitutional monarchy but a German republic, a fact reflected in the way the terms ‘patriotism’ and ‘republicanism’ became virtual synonyms.” 13 Nevertheless, also at that time the idea of the nation was somewhat ambivalent in character. Reservations about or even hostility toward other peoples were inherent elements of nationalism from the very beginning. Johann Gottlieb Fichte’s (1762–1814) Addresses to the German Nation (Reden an die deutsche Nation), 14 for example, presented the Germans as a people “whose natural disposition toward freedom dates back to prehistoric times, when they had been a pure and untainted race, a time before the influence of foreigners and the introduction of class division.” 15 This ambivalent character of the idea of the German nation later turned out to promote reactionary rather than democratic ideas about the political and social organization of the German people. In particular, after the failed revolution of 1848 and then later with the establishment of 9 Ibid., 13. 10 Ibid. 11 See in more detail G. Gröning and J. Wolschke-Bulmahn, “Changes in the Philosophy of Garden Architecture in the 20th Century and Their Impact upon the Social and Spatial Environment,” Journal of Garden History 9, 2 (1989), 53–70, especially 55. 12 Cf. ibid. 13 Hermand, Old Dreams, 10. 14 See, for example, J. G. Fichte, Addresses to the German Nation, Westport, Conn., 1979. 15 Hermand, Old Dreams, 14. 192
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