Today, visitors can still stroll through the landscape park that Hermann Prince von Pückler-Muskau began creating more than 200 years ago and which is now a German-Polish UNESCO World Heritage Site: Muskauer Park on the Lusatian Neisse. However, the appearance of the park is changing, as the damage to the park’s trees and shrubs has increased significantly in recent years. What the park administration is doing to preserve a historic park in times of climate change. […]
Today, visitors can still stroll through the landscape park that Hermann Prince von Pückler-Muskau began creating more than 200 years ago and which is now a German-Polish UNESCO World Heritage Site: Muskauer Park on the Lusatian Neisse. However, the appearance of the park is changing, as the damage to the park’s trees and shrubs has increased significantly in recent years. What the park administration is doing to preserve a historic park in times of climate change.
“In landscape gardening, we are not in a position to deliver a permanent, firmly completed work, like the painter, sculptor and architect, because it is not a dead but a living work […]”, writes Hermann Prince von Pückler-Muskau in his “Notes on Landscape Gardening” from 1834. At this time, he had been working on creating an extensive landscape park in his Muskau estate for around 20 years. Although he would not be able to complete the park as he envisioned it, he sold his property in Muskau in 1845. Regardless of this, he was aware that a park would never be a completed work, as the quoted passage from the chapter “Conservation” shows. He continues: One must not stop working on a park in order to maintain its designed appearance. “Our main tool, which we now use to create, our brush and chisel, is the spade; but the main tool of preservation and continued work is the axe”, writes Pückler. Muskauer Park, known as Park Mużakowski in Polish, can still be visited today, more than 200 years later. The fact that this living work of art continues to exist is due not only to conservation, but also to restoration and reconstruction measures.
The 830-hectare Muskauer Park is one of the few cross-border UNESCO World Heritage Sites. One third is on the German side – including the main buildings such as the New Palace. Around two thirds of the park area extends east of the Neisse River on Polish territory. The two parts of the park are connected by two reconstructed bridges over the Neisse: since the end of the 1980s, the German and Polish administrations have been cooperating in the restoration of the landscape park, which dates back to the plans of Hermann Fürst von Pückler-Muskau in the first half of the 19th century. In 2004, UNESCO added the landscape park to its list of World Heritage Sites.
The successful restoration of the cross-border park after destruction during the Second World War and after the Polish side had been left to run wild for decades is part of the story of Muskauer Park. The necessary cross-national cooperation, the German-Polish understanding in numerous projects since then, follows on from this. Even before that lies the history of its creation: Pückler’s vision, but also the lesser-told involvement of his wife Lucie, the gardener and garden artist Jacob Heinrich Rehder and Eduard Petzold. Or how the subsequent owner, Frederick, Prince of the Netherlands, invested in the park, replaced Pückler’s less stable wooden bridges with more solid constructions and had other, as yet unrealized measures implemented. The park is also relevant from an art-historical and professional-historical perspective, as a complete work of art, as an important example of a landscape park in the 19th century and as a contribution to the development of the disciplines of landscape architecture and garden design. The numerous facets of Muskauer Park thus fan out; their sum makes the park the place it is today – and which is now being damaged by the effects of climate change.
Even today, the park still largely follows Pückler’s “roadmap”, says Cord Panning, park director and managing director of the “Fürst-Pückler-Park Bad Muskau” foundation, which is responsible for managing the German part of the park. By this he means the placement of the buildings, how the paths and watercourses are laid out, the topography and the spatial layout of the park. And this despite the fact that the park was damaged during the war and that Pückler was succeeded by several new owners. Instead of adapting the park to their own ideas, the successors not only decided to respect Pückler’s park vision, but also partly continued his roadmap, albeit stylistically updated, explains Panning. And that is how they still do it today, he explains. Historical substance is respected; where there are flaws, attempts are made to act in the spirit of Pückler. If this is not possible, there are redesigns – the projects range from smaller ones in the flower gardens to larger investments. Panning estimates that Pückler would not be dissatisfied with the further development of his vision and the current shape of the park. Between the original park design and current projects, however, lies the recent history of the garden monument: before the question of its preservation could arise at the end of the 20th century, the park had to be restored in the first place. “Muskauer Park as we knew it from literature actually no longer existed,” says Panning. This has to do with the division of the park along the Neisse: According to Panning, while things were fine in terms of the way the park section was treated as a garden monument in the GDR, the overall spatial composition no longer existed. However, this was fundamental to Muskauer Park. “Even if good work was done on the German side, the counterpart was always missing,” says Panning. On the Polish side, the park areas were assigned to the forestry administration; paths and open spaces subsequently became overgrown and the spatial composition created by the vegetation was lost. The result was a veritable jungle, as Panning calls it. He describes the restoration of the park as a mixture of restoration and reconstruction: on the Polish side, paths and lines of sight were restored, the outlines of destroyed architecture were indicated with low walls and the bridges over the Neisse were rebuilt.
Like Pückler, Panning says that work on a park is never finished: “You are in a dynamic process that needs to be managed.” This involves working with the park’s trees and shrubs, for example. In the past, there was a principle of gradual transformation, says Panning. The number of old trees that had to be removed each year was kept within limits – he cites 30 to 50 trees as a key figure. With 16,000 trees on the German side of Muskauer Park alone, this is a small percentage. New specimen trees from the nursery replaced the old ones. Visitors were largely unaware of the process, reports Panning. However, after the drought years of 2018 to 2020 and in times of climate change, this principle is no longer working: “The number of trees being felled has increased exponentially,” says Panning. Instead of 30, there are now 300 trees a year that fall, and the trend is rising.
Muskauer Park is not the only historic park that is suffering from the effects of climate change. Researchers at TU Berlin shared the results of their study “Park Damage Report Model Project” with the public at the beginning of this year. In this study, they examined 61 historic gardens and parks in Germany – more precisely, the damage to their trees and shrubs as a result of climate change. The data analysis regarding vitality revealed that in 2022, around 59 percent of the trees in the parks studied were impaired – from slightly to moderately and severely to dead.
Norbert Kühn, Professor at TU Berlin, Head of the Department of Vegetation Technology and Plant Use and also head of the Park Damage Report study, sees an urgent need for action here. Because: “The dry years of 2018 to 2020 have created a completely new situation, and many of the parks are facing problems that they have not faced before.” The biggest challenge for historic parks due to the effects of climate change is the death of old, large trees, says Kühn. Two main issues here are heat and drought: the latter causes the soil to dry out, even in deeper layers. Heat in turn increases evaporation – two “self-reinforcing effects”, says Kühn.
In the study, the researchers found large local differences between the plants investigated. In some plants, 90 to 100 percent of the trees were damaged, while in others it only affected 5 to 25 percent of the tree population. They found it difficult to interpret these differences, says Kühn: “You have to assume that every park is an individual.” Each one has different framework conditions, so the location and soil composition, time of origin and state of preservation are different.
It is now important that the individual parks become aware of their individual vulnerability, emphasizes Kühn. By this he means that park administrations are aware of the natural conditions such as soil and water or the age of the trees. According to Kühn, this is not a matter of course for historical sites: “We know a lot about the art-historical background of the parks – but often very little about the ecological conditions.” Monitoring the damage is also important in the future, as well as continuing to survey individual trees. He would also like this to be digitized to provide a better basis for future assessments. Although Muskauer Park was not part of the TU Berlin study, damage to the trees and shrubs has also been recorded here. And the management of Muskauer Park is already taking measures.
A hotspot of the problems in Muskauer Park is the Bergpark. The elongated part of the park on the German side is located southwest of Bad Muskau. “The beech trees have been collapsing here since 2018,” says Cord Panning. The damage is caused by heat and drought, but also by fungal and insect infestations. One of the approaches now being used in Muskau is nothing new: natural regeneration. This means that new young trees are allowed to grow on their own from seeds from the local tree population. In the Muskauer Bergpark, these are mainly copper beeches. Interventions are made in the regrowing stock, such as thinning out or removing unwanted tree species. Individual young trees that have grown up in this way can also be moved to other places in the park as solitary trees, so-called self-promotion. Instead of buying trees from tree nurseries, they are developed from the park’s own stock. According to Panning, “myriads of young beech trees” can already be seen in the Bergpark. “We have an excellent starting material with which we can now work back into the design of the historic garden.” Panning cites the fact that the trees grown in this way are more resilient and resistant as an advantage. This is where epigenetic effects come into play: the parent generation feeds environmental stress – such as a lack of water – into the seed via enzymes known as methylation, which activates or blocks certain DNA properties, he explains. The next generation of trees is then already adapted to these new conditions caused by climate change and can also grow under them. Last but not least, this approach to restoring the tree population is cheaper and requires less care and water than planting new trees. It was nothing sensational, but it was a realization that we were moving away from outsourcing and towards working with natural processes, says Panning. Natural regeneration is not a one-to-one replacement for planting a purchased, already larger tree – especially with regard to the appearance of the park. Succession gardening, as Panning calls it, takes more time: “It’s a process that can take decades. It requires a rethink, including in management.” And natural regeneration and thus adaptation to changing site conditions cannot be applied to all tree species – for example, not to those that are vegetatively propagated, or cloned, for example by cuttings. In Muskau, this applies to trees that are prominently placed in the center, but only a few, says Panning in conversation. He estimates that problems will arise sooner or later with such vegetatively propagated tree species that are genetically identical. To prevent this, new breeding lines with a different genetic disposition are needed.
Overall, however, Panning advocates working with natural processes and taking a holistic approach to the maintenance of a park, and having as many tools as possible at your disposal to adjust what you can do horticulturally in the park. “If you have these tools at your disposal, I am convinced that you can defy the challenges of climate change,” says Panning.
The appearance of historic parks will change in the future. This is also the case in Muskauer Park, where more young trees will replace old ones in the coming years. But once you understand the background, you can also see it in a positive light, says Panning – “because it will continue with the next generation”. It remains to be seen how the young copper beeches in the Bergpark will develop and whether the approach of natural regeneration will prove successful for Muskauer Park. In any case, work will continue on the landscape park initiated by Pückler, albeit under different conditions in times of climate change – because the living garden work of art that is Muskauer Park will never be complete.
Muskauer Park, known as Park Mużakowski in Polish, literally transcends borders: Covering several hundred hectares, the park straddles both sides of the Lusatian Neisse and is therefore located in both Germany and Poland. On the German side, the park surrounds the Saxon municipality of Bad Muskau; the south-eastern edge of the park borders the Polish town of Łęknica.
Muskauer Park goes back to Hermann Fürst von Pückler-Muskau, who developed and began to implement his vision for the landscape park over several decades in the first half of the 19th century. Pückler’s gardener Jacob Heinrich Rehder and his wife Lucie, née von Hardenberg, were instrumental in making the Gesamtkunstwerk a reality.
Pückler worked on the park from 1815 to 1845. Having run into financial difficulties, the Pücklers sold the property in Muskau in 1845. He was not able to realize all of his ideas for Muskau Park, but he nevertheless recorded his vision in his description of the park in the 1834 publication “Andeutungen über Landschaftsgärtnerei”.
Subsequent owners, including Prince Frederick of the Netherlands and later the Counts of Arnim, continued to design the park – largely in line with Pückler’s ideas, adapting the style to the respective times and sometimes adding their own. Under the new sovereign Prince Friedrich, Rehder was succeeded by his pupil, the garden artist Eduard Petzold.
Muskauer Park is a landscape park that is significant as a complete work of art, but also influenced the development of landscape architecture and garden design.
the development of landscape architecture and garden design as a profession. Prince Pückler was inspired by the latest designs of English landscape gardens, which he saw during his stays in England. He attached great importance to visual axes and perspectives and composed scenery in such a way that parallels could be drawn with landscape painting. For Muskauer Park, Pückler created lakes and the Hermannsneiße, an artificial fork in the river; however, he also worked with the existing topography. The meandering paths deliberately open up different views to visitors – today again, it must be said.
Since 1945, Muskauer Park has been divided into two states due to the new border along the Neisse. At the end of the Second World War, the park was destroyed, the bridges over the river were blown up and the New Palace – rebuilt by Prince Friedrich in the neo-Renaissance style – burned to the ground. The eastern part on Polish territory, around two thirds of the entire park, was subsequently treated as a nature reserve and became overgrown. This and the division of the park meant that the overall composition with its visual axes and perspectives was no longer given.
Since 1992, the western part of the park in Germany has belonged to the Free State of Saxony. In 1993, the Free State established the dependent foundation “Fürst-Pückler-Park Bad Muskau”. Since then, its mission has been to restore and preserve the ensemble in cooperation with its Polish partners. The Narodowy Instytut Dziedzictwa, the National Institute for Cultural Heritage of the Republic of Poland, is responsible for the part of the park located in Poland. In the late 1980s and early 1990s, a joint German-Polish initiative was launched to restore the park, which has been gradually taking place ever since. This concerns both the landscape composition of the park and structural elements: the bridges over the Neisse were reconstructed – the central double bridge from 2002 to 2003 and the English Bridge from 2009 to 2011 – allowing the two parts of the park to grow together again and making it possible to walk through the park again as Pückler had intended. The New Palace was rebuilt from the mid-1990s until 2013. Muskauer Park has been a German-Polish UNESCO World Heritage Site since 2004. It is one of the few cross-border World Heritage Sites. The park is freely accessible to all; exhibitions in the New Palace and the palace garden and the ascent to the palace tower cost an entrance fee.
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