When looking from the verge of the Schlossplatz towards the south-west, across the lightly sloping meadow and a group of singly spaced trees, onto the small lake and across it, you can see the Seegarten in its entire expansion. The position which allows this view lies in the “small, immediately apprehensible segment” which the vista has opened.
Until the 19th century the area was taken in by the fruit and vegetable garden and the fishponds of the monastery. A plan from the year 1790 shows how densely packed the asparagus and vegetable beds, small meadows and orchards, hotbeds, greenhouses and an orangery, flower beds, a bean alley, a dam with hop poles etc. and seven ponds were situated: an obviously intensive economy.
As a result of the Napoleonic secularization and the Main Deputation Act of the Reich dated February 25, 1803 Amorbach is given to the Principality of Leiningen. The new sovereign, Karl Friedrich Wilhelm zu Leiningen, dissolves the Abbey on March 2, 1803. During the following years, he tries with great élan to unite within the new Principality the districts which had formerly been under the jurisdiction of Mainz, Würzburg and the Palatinate. Nevertheless, even a small matter like the former abbey᾿s economy garden doesn’t᾿t slip his mind. Already on October 27, 1803, the Prince asks von Geiling, State minister of Baden, to employ “Sckell with his advice and know-how, who formerly had designed my garden in Dürckheim and whom I trust formidably”.
He is to inspect the “locality” in Amorbach and to design the park. [Kellner, SEEGARTEN, p. 10]. Friedrich Ludwig Sckell was, at the time court gardener in Schwetzingen and chief gardener of the Palatinate and Bavaria. In 1804 he is named Royal gardening director in Munich, where he finishes the English Garden and connects the baroque garden in Nymphenburg to a scenic landscape garden. Sckell delivers the “design”. Works start in 1806/1807 and in 1817 the transformation is completed.
When you walk from the so far chosen point of view at the top side of the Seegarten into the park toward the Fischhaus and past it, you see on the meadow beautiful groups of trees. The narrow path leads alongside a steep slope with bushes and trees. Above it the road to Kirchzell runs along. It is invisible, since the medium and larger trees overtop it and build for the eyes of the walker a unity with the trees beyond the road.
At the opposite side of the lake the way runs close to the water and leads back to the Schloßplatz. Covered by bushes and overtopped by trees there is a wall which separates the park from the river Mud. But you see this separation only on a plan or perhaps sometime in winter after leaves and snow have fallen. The planting method, the grouping and connection of the trees and bushes conceal the separation, making it invisible, and even more, they integrate the steep rising forest of the Wolkmann, across the Mud, into the park.
The Seegarten doesn’t contrast with the landscape surrounding it, but integrates itself into it. Sckell explained in his book BEITRÄGE ZUR BILDENDEN GARTENKUNST (1818) this basic character of landscape parks right into the details of choice of place, the planning and preparation of the garden, the choice of plants and planting method. “Above all else, the gardening artist ought to use the surrounding beauties of nature […]: Y o u m u s t c a l l i n t h e C o u n t r y, is what said Pope: You must call in the exterior landscape.” [BEITRÄGE S. 45]
But how can one call into a limited garden area the outer beauties of nature? On the west- and eastern borders of the Seegarten with their transitions into the woods of the Wolkmann and the declivities of the Beuchener Berg this question doesn’t suggest itself, the more so on the southern border which runs east-westerly. The confinement of even a small, limited park and the exclusion of the natural environment contradict the character of the landscape park. Sckell introduces in his BEITRÄGEN the English solution to this problem, the so called “Hahas”, which are borderline ditches in the ground which you only notice when you stand almost in front of them (sunken fences).
The garden artist, he writes, “ought to use the Haha’s, which mustn’t have any noticeable border, no ending, in those places where his garden part is lacking expansion. There he should combine the beauty of the surrounding landscape with his limited gardening part and thus delude by its restriction.” [BEITRÄGE S. 63] In the Seegarten this solution was not literally employed. The large meadow south of the lake is not marked by a Haha. In its place there stands a fence which, however, is so easily seen through and overlooked that it doesn’t allow any perception of a border or ending to arise, but instead opens the view into the valley of the Mud, between Wolkmann and the Beuchener Berg and past the Pulvermühle and the Glasbrünnlein, and towards Buch and the castle Wildenberg. How far does the sight of the beautiful landscape reach and deceives us about the limitation of the park? It reaches up to a point where anything concrete becomes indistinguishable.
Text Friedrich A. Uehlein
Translation: Annette Allwardt