Chinesischer Turm e.V.The idea behind the park
The English landscape garden
The English Garden is not named after Englishmen who laid it out; it follows a school of garden design. That school was political before it was beautiful.
English Garden
Two conceptions of a garden
The French baroque garden of Versailles orders nature: axes, symmetry, clipped hedges, a centre from which everything can be surveyed. The garden shows that the ruler masters nature.
The English landscape garden of the 18th century reverses this. It works with curving paths, open meadows, free groups of trees, watercourses meant to look natural. There is no point from which you see everything. You have to walk to experience the garden.
The rules of the school
- No axes
- Paths curve so that views open one after another instead of all at once.
- Scenes instead of survey
- The park is a sequence of pictures the walker passes through.
- Follies
- Individual buildings give the scenes their theme: a round temple, a pagoda, a hermitage. The Chinese Tower and the Monopteros are exactly that.
- Hidden boundaries
- Ditches instead of walls, so the eye runs past the park's edge into the landscape.
- Water in motion
- Streams and lakes look found, not built. At the Kleinhesseloher lake that is precisely the intention.
Munich, 13 August 1789
On that day Elector Karl Theodor decreed that the land by the Isar be turned into a people's park. The word is decisive. Elsewhere landscape gardens arose as princely gardens; here the park was meant for the public from the beginning.
The driving force was Benjamin Thompson, Count Rumford (1753 to 1814), a physicist and inventor born in North America and in Bavarian service. He conceived the park as a military and at the same time civic utility garden, with an expressly social purpose.
The artistic elaboration came from Friedrich Ludwig von Sckell (1750 to 1823), the most important German garden artist of his time. He dissolved the initially stricter structures and gave the park the wide meadows and loose groups of trees that characterise it today.
The park in numbers
- Area
- around 375 hectares, 3.75 square kilometres
- Division
- southern part around 130 hectares, northern part around 245 hectares
- Extent
- southern part about two kilometres, northern part about three kilometres in length
- Paths
- 78 kilometres
- Visitors
- around five million a year
- Founding
- decree of 13 August 1789
Why this matters for the tower
The Chinese Tower is no accidental building. It is the first great folly of this park, finished in 1790, and with the inn of 1792 it received the sociable function garden theory had intended for it. That 7,000 people sit side by side here today is the continuation of the idea of 1789 by other means.
Frequently asked questions
Why is the English Garden called English?
Because it follows the English school of garden art, with curving paths, open meadows and free groups of trees, in contrast to the axially symmetric baroque garden.
When was the English Garden founded?
On 13 August 1789 Elector Karl Theodor decreed that the land be turned into a people's park.
How big is the English Garden?
Around 375 hectares, that is 3.75 square kilometres, with 78 kilometres of paths and about five million visitors a year.
Who designed the English Garden?
The idea went back to Benjamin Thompson, Count Rumford. The artistic elaboration came from Friedrich Ludwig von Sckell.
What is a folly?
A building in a landscape garden that gives a scene its theme, such as a round temple, a pagoda or an artificial ruin.