Former garden trend

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The Victoria water lily is so large that a six-year-old girl can sit on one of its leaves. A leaf can carry up to 70 kilos.

(Bild: AP Bernd Kammerer)

The trend in the 18th century was away from geometry and towards the paradisiacal. A historical walk around Lippitzbach Castle, where a colossal agave with 35 arms was a magnet for visitors and the garden was so important that the countess even remembered the gardener in her will.

"Enticing to look at and with delicious fruit": this is how the Garden of Eden is described in Genesis. Even in paradise, the garden had two functions: It was to be both an ornamental and a kitchen garden, pleasing to the eye and filling the stomach. The ancient peoples also created gardens for this purpose.

Victoria amazonica in the garden of Chatsworth House in Great Britain: A girl stands on one of the floating leaves, which led to this illustration in 1849.

(Bild: Geschichtsverein Kärnten)

"A new garden style spread from the 1920s onwards. The English landscape style, which imitated natural landscapes, was a break with the Baroque tradition, in which absolutist rule was combined with the subjugation of nature to mathematical principles," says Klagenfurt historian and amateur gardener Roland Bäck, who regularly conducts historical research for the Carinthian Historical Society - for example on the garden of Count Egger in Lippitzbach.

Former fashion gardens

There were well-known landscape gardens in Carinthia in Damtschach near Wernberg, at the Counts Lodron in Gmünd, at Prince Porcia in Spittal, at the Ritter von Bohr in Rosegg, at the Edlen von Moro in Mageregg near Klagenfurt, at the Counts Christalnigg on Hagenegg near Bad Eisenkappel and at Count and Countess Egger on Lippitzbach near Ruden.

Sensational, exotic plants
This landscape garden near the castle in Ruden followed the international fashion trend and expressed a modern attitude. "Lippitzbach is an outstanding example - a horticultural microcosm - of how English garden culture gained a foothold in Carinthia, which social classes and personalities were involved and how garden concepts lost importance after 1850 compared to the species richness of a botanical plant collection," says Bäck. It was not sophisticated garden ideas, but a rare blooming water lily or an agave that caused a sensation back then.

Beautiful to look at and fragrant
Lippitzbach Castle, originally the manor house of the hammer mill, came into the possession of Count Maximilian Thaddäus von Egger in 1791, who had the late Baroque building rebuilt in a classicist-Biedermeier style. From 1833, after the marriage of Ferdinand von Egger to Nothburga von Lodron-Laterano, the garden was probably redesigned. As the terrain around the palace is uneven, it had to be terraced. To the south of the castle, retaining walls separate three garden levels - the last of which lies directly on the cliff edge above the Drau. An English garden with foreign trees and a rose garden was laid out. The count was probably inspired by a trip to England and the countess must have been familiar with such gardens from her home in Gmünd, where her family had a landscape garden. Rose cultivation was popular in the 19th century. "It was all about the decorative effect and the scent," says historian Bäck.

"...as if it had been created by the imagination of a skilled landscape painter..." is how the canon and historian Heinrich Hermann described the castle garden of Lippitzbach in 1841. Naturally, there were no staffage buildings such as temples and ruins due to the limited space. Instead, the surrounding forest was included as an extended park.

Rarities in the garden
After Count Ferdinand's death in 1860, the landscape garden was transformed into a garden of historicism, in which rarities could also be found. In the second half of the 19th century, nurseries were already introducing plant novelties. "Around 90 plant genera with at least 140 species, varieties and cultivated hybrids were on display in the greenhouse in Lippitzbach alone in 1875," writes Bäck. Palms, ferns, orchids, bromeliads, coffee plants and papaya were grown in the two greenhouses, which had smoke channel heating. A separate greenhouse with a heated basin was built for the Queen Victoria giant water lily, which could only be admired in Lippitzbach in the whole of Carinthia.

For the tropical Queen Victoria giant water lily, the Victoria amazonica, which was grown from imported seeds by head gardener Leopold Miltschinsky, a separate greenhouse with a heatable basin was built during Count Ferdinand's lifetime.

Roland Bäck, Historiker und Hobbygärtner, erforschte den Garten von Schloss Lippitzbach bei Ruden

Rush of visitors because of the colossal agave
A huge, flowering agave caused a sensation in 1876: almost 1200 visitors flocked to the garden within a few weeks! The agave had a diameter of four and a half meters. The flowers grew over six meters high in August 1876, with each of the two main branches and 33 side branches bearing 150 to 200 small flower bells.

After the elderly Countess Nothburga died in 1884, her nephews, the Barons of Helldorf, took over the crisis-ridden rolling mill, which was about to close, and the estate. In her will, the countess had already provided for her head gardener's pension during her lifetime.