Anyone strolling through the castle park in Rumpenheim can enjoy a beautiful piece of earth. But the park, which stretches east of the former summer residence of the Landgrave of Hesse-Kassel, is much more than that. It is a piece of cultural history, largely created in the 1980s, when gardens were no longer trimmed with rulers and hedge shears as in the French Baroque period, and English landscape gardens came into fashion instead.
In the second half of the 18th century, the palace park in Rumpenheim even attracted the attention of Europe's most famous garden theorist at the time. Christian Cay Ludwig Hirschfeld wrote in his five-volume work "Theorie der Gartenkunst" (1779-1785):
"The small garden has a free planting of native and foreign trees, among which there are particularly excellent catalpa trees (trumpet trees), which blossom every year and produce ripe seed that blossoms happily, proof of the mildness of this stretch of sky. The garden deserves to be improved because of its serene location. This includes in particular the cutting down of the remaining old hedges and the division of the large shrubbery into more attractive groups, which would also create more aisles."
Paths like winding paths of life
In the theory of the English landscape garden, the paths have an important function: like an adventure trail, they open up the park to the walker in all its diversity. The twists and turns are a symbol of the winding path that human life sometimes takes.
Hirschfeld described it like this:
"In pleasure groves and bushes, in wildernesses on the banks of waters, one likes to roam along winding paths, one likes to creep down them into wooded depths and dark hermitages, one likes to wind up them to heights in the round. This gradually results in a multiplication and constant alternation of specimens. In gardens of a smaller size, winding passages can also serve to create an illusion of enlargement."
The idea behind English landscape gardens is that they should reflect nature in its ideal form. Varied garden architecture should ensure that walkers can stroll through landscapes of different characters that emphasize different human moods - serene or melancholy.
Various elements in Rumpenheim Palace Park are also reminiscent of this concept. These have been accentuated more strongly again in recent years, based on an implementation concept created in 2010, which included selected measures from the 1995 park maintenance plan.
The selected measures open up the topographical features of the park, take up important visual relationships and restore part of the path structure according to the historical model. The development of the wooded areas was also taken into consideration in order to counteract the increasing depletion of tree species and to achieve a healthy age structure for the overaged stock.
A path leads from the Monopteros towards the Main. This path still marks the boundary of the part of the park that the landgrave's building councillor Friedrich Adam Franke once laid out in the style of English landscape gardens. It could be described as the younger brother of Bergpark Wilhelmshöhe in Kassel, as there were actually two brothers at work in Kassel and Rumpenheim.
Let's take a look at the history:
Originally a manor house
Once the meeting place of the European aristocracy
In his will, Frederick had stipulated that the estate was to be shared by all his children. And so relatives scattered all over Europe met there. Queen Mary, the grandmother of Queen Elizabeth II of England, was among the guests, as were King George I of Greece, the Russian Tsar Alexander III, the Austrian Emperor Franz Joseph I and the Prussian Bundestag envoy Bismarck.
The newest part of the park was built around 1858, when the existing park was doubled in size and new staffage buildings were erected - including the delicately constructed Turkish pavilion with its characteristic crescent moon.
In 2019, two new paths with a total length of 320 meters were created. These make the topographical features of the park accessible to visitors, re-establish important visual connections and emphasize the significant historical path structure of the two park areas in parts.
With this project, two central measures from the "Implementation concept for the park maintenance work at Rumpenheim Palace Park" adopted in 2010 were realized. The planning was carried out in close coordination and with the approval of the relevant advisory boards (Nature Conservation and Monument Protection Advisory Board) and the Lower Monument Protection Authority, the Hesse State Office for Monument Preservation and the Office for the Environment, Energy and Climate Protection / Lower Nature Conservation Authority. The "Rumpenheim Citizens' Initiative" was also continuously informed about the various planning steps and involved in the planning process.