Schwetzingen - Schlösser-Magazin

IV.
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Fig. 3: New orangery from the
south (Photo: Pechacek).
IV. Palace Gardens: Role and Significance
summer it is home to six hundred and thirty
orange, bay, grenade, myrtle and other trees.”
He goes on to say: “The regular rows of
orange, lemon, bay and grenade trees may
not be aesthetically pleasing, and they tire the
eye; but one is compensated for this by the
sweetest of smells that fill the air all about;
and even the eye discovers things of beauty;
the lemon blossoms prettily, the golden
orange glows beneath dark green, and the
flaring grenade sends a thousand rays from
the branches.”
John Claudius Loudon, the most esteemed
garden writer of the 19 th century, who visited
Schwetzingen in 1828, reports in his widely
read “Enyclopedia of Gardening”: “In the
spacious orangery here, there are 465 large
orange trees, between 200 and 300 years old;
myrtles having trunks six inches in diameter,
pomegranates, sweet bays, common laurels,
laurustinus, and arbutus trained like orange
trees.” He notes, moreover, that there is a
“very large collection of greenhouse plants at
Schwezingen, including 140 species of Erica”. 3
An “Alphabetical Seed Store”, established by
Zeyher in 1828 in the orangery glasshouse,
suggests that the building was acquiring a new
function, and that the forced cultivation of
vegetables were consequently on the retreat.
3 Loudon, John Claudius: An encyclopedia of gardening, New Ed.
London 1850, pp. 143-146.
Postcards from the 1890s and early 20 th
century show tubs on display again in the
circular parterre and the mosque courtyard.
Only a few of the old pomegranates, bays
and palms survived the frosty nights of
February 1945, largely unprotected, after the
roof and windows of the eastern orangery
wing suffered partial war damage. Changes
in the use, and with that the spatial order, of
the orangery building and its surroundings
had begun around 1900. The middle section
became home to a school of horticulture
and cookery, “offering young girls in the
countryside abundant opportunities to
learn how to look after a garden”. This
establishment closed down after the First
World War. The provisional buildings put up
here for the palace nursery in the early 20 th
century survived, on the other hand, until
1975. They proved as alien in this otherwise
homogenous landscape as the orangery
garden itself, now relegated to a propagation
patch. Only when a new nursery was built on
its original site in the former kitchen garden
in the south-east corner of the Schwetzingen
gardens did the spatial situation regain its
basic structure of 1767.
From 1996, after long years of neglect, the
orangery building was subjected to a thorough
restoration, salvaging as much as possible
of the original fabric. Since then, the east
wing of the orangery and the adjoining glass
house have again provided a place for the
considerable inventory of tubs to overwinter
as historically intended, while in the west
wing the original garden statues have found a
safe haven in a lapidarium, shielded from the
wind and weather.