Carl Julius Fintelmann

Carl Julius Fintelmann (born September 20, 1794 in Berlin ; † June 24, 1866 in Charlottenburg ) was a royal court gardener who mainly worked in Potsdam .

Live and act

Originally from a gardening dynasty, Carl Fintelmann was the son of the Berlin commercial gardener Friedrich Wilhelm Julius Fintelmann (1766-1816). Following the family tradition, he also learned the gardening trade and completed an apprenticeship in the Botanical Garden Berlin from April 1810 to February 1813 . In the wars of liberation against Napoleon , he joined the troops of the allies as a volunteer guard hunter from February 15, 1813 to July 11, 1814, took part in the battles near Lützen , Bautzen , Dresden and the Battle of Nations near Leipzig, and moved with the allied troops on March 31, 1814 in Paris. After his return from France he received from 1815 to 1818 an assistant put on the Peacock Island in the garden area of his uncle, the court gardener Ferdinand Fintelmann , and adopted in parallel, from 1816 to 1818 as a guest student at lectures of the University of Berlin in part. He then began his years of traveling , which took him to Vienna, Italy, Switzerland, Bavaria, Holland and England in 1819/20.

Back in Prussia, Carl Fintelmann took an examination from the garden architect Peter Joseph Lenné and the garden director Johann Gottlob Schulze in the autumn of 1820 in order to get the position of senior assistant at the Prussian court. The employment in the Potsdam Park Sanssouci took place on December 1st of that year. Four years later he was appointed court gardener as the successor to the late Friedrich Nietner and for forty years headed the area at the New Palace with the temple of friendship and hop garden as well as the area on Klausberg with Belvedere and Dragon House as far as the Devil's Bridge near Bornstedt to the north . In the year he was appointed court gardener in 1824, he married Caroline Rosalie Ballerstedt, the daughter of the Berlin businessman Carl Friedrich Ballerstedt and great-granddaughter of the court gardener in the pleasure garden area of Charlottenburg Joachim Arndt Saltzmann . The marriage produced a daughter.

A year later took over Fintelmann his Hofgärtnerpflichten 1825-1839 a teaching position in the Royal Gardener educational institution to Schöneberg and Potsdam , where he in the subjects of horticulture, fruit and vegetable, history pomology , forcing, greenhouse construction, botany and entomology taught . When he started working as a court gardener in November 1824, he was appointed a member of the Märkische Ökonomische Gesellschaft founded in Potsdam in 1791 by Johann Gottlob Schulze, among others , which “follows the example of others of its kind, with all the objects that are used for recording and Carrying the local rural and urban food shops serve […] ”, employed and whose activities consisted in the exchange of experiences and the publication in monthly magazines.

Of the numerous duties of a court gardener, his particular preference was fruit growing. He supervised the vine and peach plantations on the southern slope below the Belvedere on the Klausberg and bred new grape varieties, one of which was particularly successful and was named Lenné's honor . The results of the wine forcing were repeatedly praised in publications of the Berlin Horticultural Association, of which he was a member. In 1859 it is said that “[...] the grapes with him [have] such a training that almost all berries develop and ripen evenly. In this way, Mr. C. Fintelmann often raises grapes weighing 7–8 pounds ”. With his products he took part in the annual exhibitions of the horticultural association in June and in 1860 was one of the founding members of the German Pomologists Association . On January 28, 1864, the now 69-year-old Fintelmann was appointed head gardener to Charlottenburg, where he succeeded his uncle Ferdinand Fintelmann, who had died at the age of 89. He died two years later and found his final resting place in Potsdam.

Publications

As a member of the "Association for the Promotion of Horticulture in the Royal Prussian States", or "Berlin Horticulture Association" for short, which was founded in 1822, Carl Fintelmann took part in the meetings with contributions and published his experiences in the association's own publications "Negotiations of the Association for the Promotion of Horticulture in the Royal Prussian States ”, which until 1848 were the trend-setting organ of German horticulture . Carl Fintelmann's publications from the horticultural-technical subject area included:

• Propagation of the vines from cinder blocks , 1827
• Details of the procedure for storing the fruit for the Royal Table , 1827
• Answering the question of Count v. Bismark on the subject of the cellar donkey (Oniscus Asellus L.) , 1831
• About this year's caterpillar feeding in the orchards , 1831
• Comments on the communication of Dr. Lachmann zu Braunschweig on the unfortunate success of ring pruning in vines , 1835
• Instructions for the appropriate packaging of different types of fruit for shipments to wagons , 1835
• Om Podning i Almindelighed , 1837, in the magazine "Have-Tidende" of the Danish society for garden culture "Selskap til Haveculturens Fremme"
• Practical guide to fruit forcing , Potsdam 1837
• Precautions to be observed when planting the country roads, gardens and courtyards with fruit trees, with regard to the climate, the location and the soil , 1839
• About two insects harmful to the snowball bush (Viburnum opulus roseum) , 1847
• Notes on some growing seasons of different fruits and vegetables of the same species in the same location, during the years 1841 to 1852 , 1853
• Comments on a Report on Potato and Grape Disease , 1853
• Appropriate packaging of ripe grapes for distant shipments by rail or post , 1863

In addition, Fintelmann participated in the reference work "Reference library for gardeners and gardening enthusiasts" published by Peter Joseph Lenné between 1837 and 1842, which briefly reproduced the horticultural knowledge of the time and was easy to understand. In 1839 he published two volumes of knowledge about “Fruit Tree Cultivation” and another volume “A few words about cultivation and further care of tall-stemmed roses”.

See also

• Family tree of the Fintelmann family of gardeners (excerpt)
• List of pomologists

literature

• Foundation Prussian Palaces and Gardens Berlin-Brandenburg (Ed.): Prussian Green. Court gardener in Brandenburg-Prussia . Henschel, Potsdam 2004, ISBN 3-89487-489-9

Individual evidence

1. ↑ Weekly of the Association for the Promotion of Horticulture in the Royal Prussian States for Horticulture and Herbology. 9, 1866, p. 233.
2. ↑ SPSG: Preußisch Grün , p. 146.
3. ↑ Clemens Alexander Wimmer: The Märkische Economic Society (1791-1843) . In: House of Brandenburg-Prussian History (Hrsg.): Nice and useful. From Brandenburg's monastery, castle and kitchen gardens . Berlin / Potsdam 2004, p. 167.
4. ^ Negotiations of the Association for the Promotion of Horticulture in the Royal Prussian States. 7th Vol., 1859, p. LXV.
5. ^ Wimmer: Hermann and Emil Sello . In: SPSG: Nothing thrives without care. The Potsdam park landscape and its gardeners . Potsdam 2001, p. 242.
6. ↑ SPSG: Preußisch Grün , p. 308.
7. ^ Wimmer: The activities of the court gardeners . In: SPSG: Preußisch Grün , p. 184.