Dessau-Wörlitz Garden Realm

The Dessau- Wörlitz Garden Realm, also known as the English Grounds of Wörlitz, is one of the first and largest English parks in Germany and continental Europe. It was created in the later part of the 18th century under the regency of Duke Leopold III Friedrich Franz of Anhalt-Dessau. The park lies on the anabranch of the Elbe, making it rich in water and diversity.

The park had its origin in the 17th century, when the marriage of Prince John George II to the Dutch princess Henriette Catharina, daughter of Frederick Henry of Orange, brought a team of engineers and architects from the Low Countries to lay out the town and park of Oranienbaum.

The Dutch influence remained prevalent in Anhalt-Dessau for many decades, until the Anglophile Prince Leopold III engaged Friedrich Wilhelm von Erdmannsdorff to build Schloss Wörlitz (1769-73), the first Neoclassical building in Germany. Johann Friedrich Eyserbeck, a garden architect who designed the English Park for Leopold, was obviously indebted to such British antecedents as Claremont, Stourhead, and Stowe .

The philosophy of Jean-Jacques Rousseau and the aesthetic of Johann Joachim Winckelmann underlie the design of the park in Dessau-Wörlitz. Rousseau saw in agriculture the basis of everyday life and pointed out to educational functions of the natural landscape. Unsurprisingly, the most elegant landscape in the area is Rousseau Island, scored to imitate the island in Ermenonville where the philosopher was buried.

Minor structures of the Garden Realm, stretching for some 25 km, had far-reaching ramifications in architecture of Central Europe. The Gothic House, started by Erdmannsdorff in 1774, was one of the first Neo-Gothic structures on the continent. In 1790, the Chinese Park was laid out in Oranienbaum according to the theories of Sir William Chambers. In the early years of the following century, the landscape was enriched with the Neo-Gothic churches in Riesigk (1800), Wörlitz (1809), and Vockerode (1811).

The grounds, which had been divided into four parts since the constructions of a railway line and highway in the 1930s, were designated a World Heritage Site by UNESCO in 2000. The ICOMOS, however, noted that "the overall structure of the landscape has undergone a good deal of deterioration"[1]. Currently, a major road passes only meters away from Rousseau Island.

References

• Materials from the World Heritage website

External links

• Official site of the Dessau-Woerlitz Garden Realm
• Official site of the Wörlitz Park
• Official Site of Kulturstiftung Dessau-Wörlitz, the trust running the park
• Description and fotos (in German)
• Images from the Garden-Kingdom of Dessau-Wörlitz

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