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Planten un Blomen, Hamburg's not so hidden garden (except from yours truly)

It's one of the most seductive parks I've visited. And it was all the more enchanting for being so completely unexpected.

When Husband and I went train-touring last summer around Germany, gardens were the last thing on my mind. All the more so, since I don't think I have ever heard Hamburg mentioned in any horticultural connection whatsoever. How wrong could I be?

First, though, if you haven't visited Hamburg, may I humbly suggest you reconsider? There's so much to see, and something for just about every interest.  A boat trip round the port takes you close to big industry:

Hamburg is one of the largest ports in the world.

It has more canals than Venice (though, sometimes you wonder where doesn't, given how often this old chestnut turns up), with charming restored warehouses and buildings.

The world's largest miniature railway...

...where you'll even find a miniature garden centre:

Twilight. Night comes to the miniature railway, around every 15 minutes. In the background you can see part of the airport where planes frequently take off and arrive.

Lots of museums, galleries (we only managed the beautifully presented and extensive Maritime Museum) and churches to mooch round and, when you're done with those, the lakes formed by the River Alster offer some lovely areas for leafy escape and a super walk that could easily take most of the day as it passes plenty of interest...

The Hamburgers really enjoy the Alster - swimming, boating, canoeing, yachting. And, of course, plenty of boat excursions to take you round.

...and quite a few cafes by the water.

But what about the garden? The entrance was literally adjacent to our hotel and we didn't realise what we'd missed until it was too late to do it justice. (How embarrassing is that?)

Planten un Blomen, Hamburg's public garden

Planten un Blomen (that's Low German, in case anyone wants to pick me up on the spelling) started, in 1821, as a small botanical garden built on a redundant open firing range. By 1857 it was designated a state institute, and by the early 20th century it had acquired a museum and expanded to 10 hectares. It went through quite a few changes (World War II didn't help) and, in 1979, with the opening of the Institute of General Botany and New Botanical Garden, the original area was incorporated into the huge park which today covers 47 hectares (approx 116 acres). 

The first part we encountered was the Japanese Landscape Garden (said to be the largest in Europe). In 1988 the designer Yoshikuni Araki used existing trees, new plants and rocks to create an idealised riverscape. The 150-metre stream is kept moving with underground pumps. 

Japanese Garden. Photo: Berndt Andresen.

Somewhere there's a Japanese teahouse, where ceremonies take place regularly in summer. (Yup, we missed it.)

Japanese Tea House, Planten un Blomen, Hamburg, Germany. Photo: Berndt Andresen.

Everywhere you look an enticing view beckons you in a different direction - to a shady plateau...

...overlooking water. One of the cleverest touches, I thought, is the choice of furniture, the large Adirondack chairs, painted white. They suit the scale of the space and create a highlight that is architectural but also looks comfortable and welcoming to dawdlers.

Peaceful seats, tucked away...

...and thoughtfully planted vistas...

...though, in some places it's a bit too Piet Oudolf for me, (but the several cafes looked enticing)...

We found unexpected playthings:

 

The aim is to blast the buoys with water jets until you lodge them in the cradles. Yes, we had a go. No children (well, not many) were elbowed aside in the attempt.

Lots of sculpture:

A rose garden...

Pelargoniums in the Rosengarten. Photo: Berndt Andresen.

  ...though it majors on a lot of other blooms too. 

There are colourful corners...

...and, always a fascination, the tropical greenhouses. Nothing like Berlin's, of course...

...it's quite small, but an interesting piece of architecture:

And here's something we missed, along with the Wasserspielen, the Mediterranean Terrace, the Rollerskating Rink, the Minigolf, and the Kleine and Grosse Wallenlagen (Small and Large Ramparts, no doubt left over from pre-garden times):

Every evening there's a sound and light show at the Parksee (lake). TEN MINUTES WALK FROM THE HOTEL AND WE MISSED IT! 

There's always a danger, when encountering somewhere unexpected, that you'll imbue it with much more than it deserves, merely because it is such a surprise. But I don't think I've done this with Planten un Blomen; this really is a lovely park, which manages to be both homely and interesting. Even better, it's clearly well used and loved by the locals, who retreat there on summer evenings, take children for pony rides and attend the free concerts.

If you haven't ever thought of Hamburg as a place to visit, I really recommend it. The port, the canals, the old warehouses, the museums, the lovely Alster lake - they all combine into a holiday experience that gives Hamburg a character all of its own.  The locals were incredibly helpful - every time we opened a map someone asked us, in English, if we needed help. Whatever you do, though, DON'T MISS THE GARDEN.

NB. We stayed at the Radisson Blu, next to Dammtor Station. It's a tower block and very corporate, but had good deals on Expedia, was quiet, comfortable, within easy reach of the main attractions (AND THE GARDEN) either on foot, by bus or underground, and offered an extraordinarily extensive and really excellent breakfast. Our room was on the eastern side, which is my excuse for our not spotting the gardens and Sound and Light show to the south. All I can say is, well, we did see the sunrise...

Is there a garden that you've completely missed by accident?

 

 

Great garden blog from the Medieval Cloisters

What would be your dream job? I've just come across one that sounds like my idea of heaven, and Mr Caleb Leech has gnabbed it. He's started as Managing Horticulturalist at The Cloisters Museum this month.

I hadn't actually ever heard of The Cloisters until a couple of months ago when I was researching quinces and their blog popped up in the search. It's part of the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York and seems to offer a darn good reason to cross the Pond. (Not immediately, though. At the moment their visiting exhibition is stained glass from Canterbury Cathedral...)

The Museum itself is the only one in America dedicated exclusively to Medieval Art, and its gardens - of which there are three - have been carefully planned with reference to Medieval sources from across Europe. The Bonnefont Herb Garden includes veteran quince trees (attractively pruned) and espaliered pear trees. The Cuxa Cloister features pollarded crab apple trees and ornamental borders mingling medieval species and modern descendants. The Trie Cloister garden (being renovated at the moment) has traditionally been planted as the Medieval "flowery mead".

At first glance, it looks as if they (and the building) might have been there forever. Then you remember that this is New York. The building opened in 1938, and the gardens were laid out and planted the same year. (The oldest pear there was planted in 1940, so that's that's a moderately venerable fruit tree.)

Until her retirement in December, the Managing Horticulturalist was Dierdre Larkin and she wrote some absolutely fascinating posts on the blog, A Medieval Garden Enclosed. I highly recommend a rummage through. I've also earmarked a few of her lectures to listen to, when I get the chance (there's one in her post about Transplants.)

Caleb Leech comes, as you'd expect for a position in such an important garden, with a very good pedigree. He designed, planted and maintained the Herb Garden and Orchard at Brooklyn Botanic Garden, was raised on a farm, and worked in his family's landscaping business, as well as being the author of numerous articles.

Let's wish him well, and I hope he'll prove as enthusiastic as Dierdre was about keeping us up to date on the blog.

The Cloisters website is astonishingly short of pictures. For some lovely views, and more on the history, see The Cloisters: A Hidden Museum in New York, and The Cloisters New York City: An enchanted medieval world.

Berlin, bare branches and the Botanical Garden Part II

On the 7th day the sun shone (boy, did it shine!) and suddenly the Botanical Gardens beckoned.

Berlin has a superb, fully integrated transport system. A day's travelcard cost €6.40 and covered bus, U-bahn, trams and S-bahn (overground system). Even more impressive, our average wait for the next train/bus etc was around 4 minutes.

Arriving at Botanische Garden station was a bit like arriving at Chiswick - we stepped straight out into that suburban quiet of a sunny day, a small row of shops outside the station, the long walk (around 1 km) to the garden itself. The tall, rather stately Germanic terraces made a characterful contrast to the many high-rise mediocrities of the city centre.

Entrance to the garden is €6 - a bargain compared with the eye-watering £14.50 entrance fee to Kew. The café, in common with all the other museum cafés we visited, and unlike Kew's, was run in a homely fashion, unfranchised, producing excellent fresh, home-made soup and snacks at a very reasonable price.

Berlin Botanical Garden is the second largest in the world (126 acres to Kew's 300) and grows around 22,000 different species of plants. We didn't stay all day as we had a boat trip to get back to, so we took the Spring Tour.  Here's a taste:

Berlin, bare branches and the Botanical Garden Part 1

While gardeners in the UK were beginning to enjoy the new season, Husband and I managed to extend winter by almost a week. In Berlin. Not everyone's choice of holiday destination, but it does happen to have one of the world's largest botanical gardens.

Not that that's why we went. Hubs has been itching to visit, having overcome his anxiety, born of too many black and white movies, that he might be arrested and tortured into betraying his underground contacts.

It's easy to overdo the grim stuff. Berlin's recent history is not hidden. The Haus am Checkpoint Charlie, the Topographie des Terrors (Germany under National Socialism), and the enormous Holocaust Memorial were quite enough for one day. When the Stasi Museum appeared on the Things To Do list, I pleaded depression and regained my equilibrium with a concentrated diet of superb paintings (Gemaldemuseum), fascinating architecture (Bundestag) and excellent sausages (everywhere).

Unfortunately spring is even later than it is here (it must always be a bit behind us), and with everything brown, tired or downright dead, it reminded me of the garden of Oscar Wilde's Selfish Giant, where winter never left. There were even heaps of snow in dank, forgotten corners.

Gardening and greenery are just waiting to burst out, though. Our first inkling flashed past us on the way from the airport (no chance for photos). What looked like a very neat shanty town, with various dwellings and sharply delineated plots, was a Kleingarten, a considerably less shambolic version of our allotments. (Ben Knight gives a lovely flavour of Berlin Kleingartens, which comprise over 3% of the city's area, and Sarah Webb describes the serious business of getting a Kleingarten hedge right in Bremen.) And the birdsong that greeted us every day as we left our very centrally placed hotel on Friedrichstrasse was what first alerted me to the fact that there was more nature in the city than was apparent.

Here's some of what we found:

Display of gardening items in the Galeries Lafayette, a shopping centre so gorgeous that even I almost wanted to shop!

A Patrick Blanc "Mur Vegetal", setting off an unexpected sphinx in the Dussmann das Kulturkaufhaus bookshop.

Might have had a coffee here, but it was closed for a private do. Gardening Jules was there at the same time and has some lovely photos.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 Dwarfed by their surroundings, two beehives on top of the Berliner Dom (German Baroque - OK, but not worth the entrance fee, especially if you love Roman Baroque). Part of the Berlin is Buzzing campaign to create "a functioning urban nature and the conservation of ecosystems...and train young beekeepers".

Garden outside the Bauhaus Archiv, Berlin, April 2013

The garden outside the Bauhaus Archiv was sadly brown, tired and dusty. Bauhaus theory for Mies van der Rohe's one-storey court houses decreed that "floor area of the house and surface area of the plot had to form a harmonious relationship, with garden design and planting contributing to it. Garden plan and the interior arrangement of the house had to be interrelated, the views from the often large windows exactly calculated for near, middle and distance vision." This obviously wasn't meant to be a demonstration.

Bare branches weren't all bad. It was easy to see the enormous amount of mistletoe that grows around the city. Here it's outside the Neue Nationalgalerie, with Henry Moore's The Archer.

From fleece-wearing weather it turned in a week to 25 degrees, bringing a hint of green to city trees and the start of spring to the Botanical Garden. More in Part 2.

Boxwood Tours: garden holidays for the totally immersed

Holidays: anyone really organised is leafing through brochures as we speak. I’m not good at this. Usually I’m on the phone, trying to book a room about two hours before we leave.

Boxwood Tours were quick off the mark with their brochure this year. And if I had the money, they would be top of my list for a garden holiday. Even their brochure is a delight, dotted with picturesque illustrations. With only four short holidays available in the year, they offer total garden immersion, with a packed itinerary led by experienced horticulturalists and in which you meet garden owners and head gardeners of the properties you visit. This year they are visiting: Gardens of the Languedoc, the Kingdom of Dyfed (their cheapest, at £1398 for five days), Venice and the Veneto and the Green Heart of Ireland.

Gardening Down Under

BBC Gardener’s World comes in for a lot of stick these days. The problem is that there really isn’t much else on TV. Unlike the internet, where there’s a complete smorgasboard of gardening radio and TV.

Want to visit an Australian garden? Or wondering if gardening would be quite the same if you moved to Oz?