The Prussian gardens in Berlin, Potsdam and elsewhere in Bran-
denburg: for the first time, texts and photographs present an over-
all view of all the gardens and parks created under the Hohenzol-
lerns over a period of more than three centuries.
Only the cross-genre collaborative effort of garden designers,
gardeners, architects, scenographers, sculptors, painters, and cre-
ative rulers, the most prominent of whom were Frederick II and
Frederick William IV, made it possible »to turn the environs of Ber-
lin and Potsdam [...] step by step into a garden«, as Frederick Wil-
liam IV put it in 1840. Figures such as David Garmatter, Friedrich
Christian Glume, Sime¿on Godeau, Georg Wenzeslaus von Knobels-
dorff, Peter Joseph Lenne¿, Antoine Pesne, Prince Hermann von
Pu¿ckler-Muskau, Georg Potente, Karl Friedrich Schinkel, the Sello
brothers, and Antoine Watteau ¿ picked from a whole cornucopia
of names ¿ indicate the spectrum of artistic forces that created the
Prussian garden realm.
Impatient with his royal client, who had once again cut his fund-
ing, Lenne¿ alluded to the high standard of princely landscape art:
»Your Majesty still does not understand how ingenious my idea is.«
The present volume is an attempt to examine the »ingeniousness
of the idea« specifically inherent in the gardens of the Hohenzol-
lerns in Prussia.
Until his retirement, Hillert Ibbeken was professor of geology at
the Freie Universita¿t Berlin. He has been involved in architecture and
landscape photography throughout his life. His book Karl Friedrich
Schinkel. Das architektonische Werk heute /The architectural work
today, edited in co-operation with Elke Blauert, was published by
Edition Axel Menges in 2001. Later there followed, in the same for-
mat, this time with him as sole editor, his monographson Ludwig
Persius (2005) and Friedrich August Stu¿ler (2006), and, among oth-
ers, Schlo¿sser der Weserrenaissance/Castles of the Weser Renais-
sance(2008), edited in co-operation with Michael Bischoff, as well
as Das andere Italien/The other Italy. Geschichten und Bilder aus
Ligurien und Kalabrien/Stories and pictures from Liguria and Cala-
bria(2011).
Katja Schoene is an art historian and museologist. She was for-
merly on the staff of the National Trust in the landscape gardens at
Stowe, Buckinghamshire, and of the Stiftung Preußische Schlo¿s-
ser und Ga¿rten Berlin-Brandenburg. As a freelance author she has
written about Schloss Sanssouci, Friedrich August Stu¿ler and the
»Pomeranian curiosity cabinet«.
