Schwetzingen - Schlösser-Magazin

The interplay between the summer
residence and its landscaped surroundings
at Schwetzingen was not, however, confined
– as these concluding observations will
elaborate – to interventions in the form of
those axial paths that wove a tight web across
baronial territory 43 in the Baroque manner,
or of appropriating great swathes of land to
lay out the prince’s garden or imposing an
urban design that would set an enduring
stamp on the spatial order. A very particular
relationship emerged – and has continued
until today – between use of the land and
use of the garden, and then as now it was
characterised by inequalities.
In the 18th century, when large areas of
land were still managed under a three-field
crop rotation system, and forests were used
intensively for the collection of leaf litter,
the landscape was dominated by plant
communities of low productivity. Against
this backdrop, aristocratic gardens played a
role as first movers in cultivating the land
(and not merely as paradise-like islands of
abundance). The creation of kitchen gardens
and the experimental planting of special crops
that took place there was in part inspired by a
desire to improve agrarian production – which
in Schwetzingen, naturally, was particularly
the case with asparagus. The “Arborium
Theodoricum” and the model vineyard
there were still tended in the “Protocollum
Commissionale”, despite scant resources,
not least because they served the purpose of
“instruction of their own foresters in types of
wood”. 44
Another example is the expansion of the
orchard on the express orders of Grand
Duke Carl Friedrich, so that “from this rich
store trees may be given to subjects at the
cheapest prices to plant in the streets, the
freemen’s commons and their gardens”. 45 If
the garden in those days was a laboratory of
43 Cornelia Jöchner: Die Ordnung der Dinge: Barockgarten
und politischer Raum. In: ICOMOS, Hefte des Deutschen
Nationalkommitees. München 1997, p. 177f.
44 “Protocollum commissionale” of 30.6.1795 and 9.9.1795. In:
Heber 1986, p. 476.
45 Martin 1933, p. 182; this fruit nursery already contained about
200,000 trees in the early 19 th century.
IV. Palace Gardens: Role and Significance
modernisation, today it harbours relics of an
anthropogenic landscape and has become
a refuge of conservation, including for the
techniques of the gardener’s craft. Meadows
such as the Feldherrnwiese, where hay can be
harvested twice a year, have almost ceased to
exist on in landscapes that have been formed
by human hand.
(Svenja Schrickel/Hartmut Troll)
IV.
Fig. 9: Section of a topographic
map of the Archduchy of Baden,
1838. In the course of the 19th
century, much woodland in the
vicinity of Schwetzingen was
developed for farming.
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