Ferdinand Kindermann (gardener)

Christoph Ferdinand Kindermann (born September 6, 1805 in Berlin ; † September 15, 1865 in Potsdam ) was the first court gardener in Babelsberg Park .

Live and act

Ferdinand Kindermann was born in Berlin as the son of a businessman. There he learned the gardening trade from 1819 to 1822 in the Bellevue Palace Gardens and worked in Charlottenburg , the state tree nursery founded in Potsdam in 1823 and in the Berlin Botanical Garden . This was followed by the journeyman's migration until 1833 , which took him to Schwetzingen , Switzerland, Italy, Hungary and Austria.

When the garden architect Peter Joseph Lenné began to create a landscape garden in Babelsberg, Kindermann was initially employed as a senior assistant in 1836/37 and was appointed court gardener in 1837. From 1843 he directed the park work according to the recommendations of the horticultural artist Hermann von Pückler-Muskau , who had replaced Lenné and in the same year traveled to study at his country estate in Muskau .

From 1855 a fully functional market garden with greenhouses, farm buildings and a gardener's house was built in the southern half of the park, in which Kindermann lived with his family in the last years of his life. In 1837 he married the daughter of a Potsdam merchant, Juliane Luise Adolfine Zill. The marriage resulted in six children, including his son Otto , who succeeded him as court gardener in the Babelsberg Park after his death, whose landscaping became a life's work for both of them. In Potsdam he became a member of the Masonic Lodge Teutonia for Wisdom .

literature

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