Park von Muskau
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The Park von Muskau, officially Fürst-Pückler-Park (Polish: Park Mużakowski), is the biggest and certainly most famous English-style park of Germany and Poland. It covers roughly 545 ha of land on both sides of the Lusatian Neisse river, which constitutes the Polish-German border, the centre being the German town Bad Muskau.
On July 2, 2004, the UNESCO inscribed the park on the World Heritage List, citing its importance for "the development of landscape architecture as a discipline".
History
The founder of the park was Prince Hermann von Pückler-Muskau (1785-1871), the author of the influential Hints on Landscape Gardening and the owner of Bad Muskau since 1811. After prolonged studies in England, in 1815 he founded the Parl. As time went by, he established an international school of landscape management in Bad Muskau and outlined the construction of an extensive landscape park which would envelop the town "in a way not done before on such a grand scale".
The works involved remodeling the Old Castle and construction of a Gothic chapel, an English cottage, several bridges, and an orangery. Pückler reconstructed the New Castle as the compositional centre of the park, with a network of paths radiating from it. This went on until 1845, when Pückler was constrained to sell the patrimony. Soon it was bought by a Dutch prince, who employed Eduard Petzold, Pückler's disciple and a well-known landscape gardener, to complete his design.
During the Battle of Berlin, both castles were levelled and all four bridges across the Neisse were razed. Since 1945 the park has been divided by the state border between Poland and Germany, with two thirds of it on the Polish side. The Old Castle was eventually rebuilt by the East German administration in 1965-72, while the New Castle and the bridges are still being restored.
External links
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