Friedrich Zacharias Saltzmann

Friedrich Zacharias Saltzmann , also Salzmann (born January 3, 1731 in Charlottenburg , † November 10, 1801 in Potsdam ) was a royal court gardener in the terrace area of Sanssouci in Potsdam.

Live and act

Friedrich Zacharias Saltzmann, around 1780

Friedrich Zacharias Saltzmann was the third of fourteen children of the court gardener in the palace garden of Charlottenburg Joachim Arndt Saltzmann and Margarethe Elisabeth, née Lohmann. Like his father, he learned the gardening trade and received his training from 1746 to 1749 from his uncle, the pharmacy gardener Johann Friedrich Michelmann , in the botanical garden of the Royal Academy of Sciences in Schöneberg . After completing his apprenticeship, Saltzmann began the multi-year wandering in April 1750, which first led him to Großsedlitz near Dresden and in October via Meißen and Hubertusburg to Leipzig. From there he moved in January 1751 via Dux , Prague and Eisgrub to Vienna, where he worked for eleven months and visited the famous parks. At the end of the year he set out for Hungary with the aim of Italy and reached via Pressburg , Bruck an der Leitha , Eisenstadt as well as Venice , Rome, Pula and Manfredonia to Naples , where he said he was active in his publication on kitchen gardening in 1753 and in which he also mentions having been in England for a year.

During the Seven Years' War he took part in the Hanoverian 4th Army as provisions commissioner and probably only returned briefly to Charlottenburg in 1760, since he also married in Pyrmont Carolina Wilhelmina Hofmann (1738–1803), the daughter of a merchant from Peine . In the following years, Saltzmann probably switched from his learned profession to an innkeeper, because on the occasion of the christening of his daughter Maria Carolina Catharina Lucia, who was born in January 1766, he was entered in the parish register of the village of Oesdorf, a current district of Bad Pyrmont, as postmaster for his duties very often the hospitality of travelers at the post office was one of them.

After the death of the gardener in the melonerie (forcing) in Sanssouci, Johann Heinrich Krutisch, Friedrich II called him to Potsdam in 1766. There he can be traced for the first time on site on January 3, 1767, when he and the brother of the deceased, the court gardener of the terrace area and the melonery, Philipp Friedrich Krutisch , acknowledged receipt of flowers. Saltzmann had been assigned to Krutisch to assist, but it was difficult to work together. Saltzmann intervened […] in the rights of the Krutisch, acted independently, […], and so a violent dispute arose between the two. Krutisch, old and calm, Saltzmann, young, presumptuous, yes coarse, but he must have been favored [...] and so he [the king] ordered the division of Krutisch's territory [...] and transferred Saltzmann with cabinet order from 12 July 1767 [...] the whole upper part of the mountain of Sans Souci, together with the fig house, cherry garden and the Bysangshauß [banana house] . When Saltzmann received the district, the work on the vineyard terraces on the south side of the Sanssouci Palace had already been completed, so that between 1773 and 1786 only the terraces were glazed so that the dessert fruit could be harvested earlier. In addition, he redesigned the game and hunting area adjoining to the west, the so-called deer garden, into a forest-like park landscape.

After the death of Friedrich Zacharias Saltzmann, the court marshal and garden manager Valentin von Massow reported to King Friedrich Wilhelm III. on November 29, 1801 that on November 10th, Js. the court gardener Saltzman at Sanssouci in his 71st birthday and 35th year of service at the chest dropsy died [was]. Ew. Royal Your Majesty has lost in this man a loyal servant, a skilful and exceptionally righteous man, who exclusively before all other gardeners performed his service with zeal and especially with righteousness and never allowed himself any advantages [...]. He leaves a widow, 9 children and 6 grandchildren, […] . His son Johann Zacharias († 1810), born in 1777, was appointed as his successor in the terrace area .

Two other sons who had also learned the gardening trade went abroad. The elder Johann Georg Nikolaus (1764–1831) worked as a court gardener in the complex of the Oliva monastery near Gdansk and in the surrounding area. Georg moved to the Russian court and got a position as court gardener in the Peterhof palace complex .

Writing activities

Plan of the Frederician Park Sanssouci, 1772. Copper engraving by Johann Friedrich Schleuen after a drawing by Friedrich Zacharias Saltzmann

Friedrich Zacharias Saltzmann stood out among the Frederician gardeners for his publication activities. He was the first Prussian court gardener born in the country to publish his experiences in books and to publish a pomology and a two-part work on kitchen gardening, which later appeared again in a second edition. Saltzmann is remembered above all for the map of the Sanssouci Park, which he himself drew and which was engraved in copper by Johann Friedrich Schleuen in 1772 , for which he included a forty printed page explanation of a [...] main plan of the palaces and gardens in Sansonia. Souci added . The best and most famous overall plan of the Frederickian park to date was dedicated to the sister of Frederick II, the widowed Swedish Queen Luise Ulrike of Prussia , and largely shows the horticultural design by Saltzmann, such as the roe deer garden in the central part of the complex. Because of the artistic representation it was in 1786 by Friedrich Nicolai in his third volume "Description of the royal royal cities of Berlin and Potsdam, [...]" in the "Advertisement of the most distinguished scholars, artists and musicians now living in Berlin, Potsdam and the surrounding area" recorded. Around 1779, the French cartographer Georges Louis Le Rouge published a re-engraving of the Sanssouci plan in his series of engravings Jardins anglo-chinois à la mode , but without naming the original author Saltzmann.

Saltzmann not only received recognition, but also received heavy criticism from the Kiel philosophy professor and garden theorist Christian Cay Lorenz Hirschfeld , who propagated the new English garden style and rejected Saltzmann's late Baroque garden art in Sanssouci, or the mixture of vegetable and ornamental gardens. The public dispute began with a nine-page criticism of Hirschfeld in his "garden calendar for the year 1784", whereupon Saltzmann replied in his publications with a 36-page reprimand for the Holstein reviewer and counter-criticism of Hirschfeld's garden calendar. Basically, Saltzmann was not averse to the English landscape garden , but considered it more suitable for England due to the exotic trees and sensitive lawns. All imitations in our climate will always lag far behind , he wrote in the rebuke [...] . As a member of the “Märkische Ökonomische Gesellschaft” association founded in Potsdam in 1791, he wrote not only the book projects but also essays in the “Annals of the Märkische Ökonomische Gesellschaft”.

Publications

• Explanation of an engraved in copper, Ihro Königl. Majesty the widowed Queen of Sweden [...] dedicates the main plan of the palaces and gardens to Sans-Souci . 1st edition 1772; 2nd edition 1779.
• Pomology or fruit theory, containing an instruction to recognize all fruit growing in the open air of our climate by its color, shape, taste and name; along with a brief message about the culture of these trees. For the best of all beginners in gardening science . Potsdam 1774; 2nd edition, Berlin 1793.
• The two-part work: Thorough instruction on how to treat all kinds of kitchen and specimen herbs throughout the year, how to have them early and late in both the French and Dutch ways, to adapt them to our climate, to be useful or harmful to health . Volume 1, Berlin 1781; Volume 2, Berlin 1783 under the title: Kurzgefaßte; but detailed; Dutch morning forage, that is, instruction on how all kinds of fruits and flowers are to be grown in the best and cheapest way [...] .
• Second part of the kitchen garden together with a garden calendar and copper plates arranged for both parts . 2nd edition from 1st volume 1786, with the subtitle and attached insignificant reprimand for the Holstein reviewer of the first edition and the 2nd edition from 2nd volume 1787.
• About the destruction of ants , in: Annalen der Märkische Ökonomischen Gesellschaft, 1, 1791, No. 1, p. 25f.
• Treatise on the propagation and safe planting of softwood in general , in: Annalen der Märkische Ökonomischen Gesellschaft, 1, 1793, No. 2, pp. 121 ff.

literature

• Foundation Prussian Palaces and Gardens Berlin-Brandenburg (Ed.): Nothing thrives without care. The Potsdam park landscape and its gardeners . Exhibition catalog, Potsdam 2001, p. 211ff.
• Foundation Prussian Palaces and Gardens Berlin-Brandenburg (Ed.): Prussian Green. Court gardener in Brandenburg-Prussia . Henschel Verlag, Potsdam 2004, ISBN 3-89487-489-9 .

Individual evidence

1. ↑ Saltzmann: Thorough instructions on how to make all kinds of kitchen plants ... , p. XI, p. XXXI.
2. ^ From the memoirs of the merchant Johann Gottlob Ernst Kienitz, the husband of Saltzmann's youngest sister Henriette Friederike (1751–1807), written in 1808.
3. ^ Travel report by Friedrich Zacharias Saltzmann. Published by Alexander Bethge in the Hamburger Garten- und Blumenzeitung, 21st year, 1865, pages 358–365.
4. ↑ Michael Seiler, in: SPSG: Nothing flourishes without care , p. 212. In SPSG: Preußisch Grün , p. 330, the name is given as Wilhelmine Henriette Caroline Hoffmann .
5. ↑ Michael Seiler, in: SPSG: Nothing thrives without care , p. 212.
6. ↑ Johann Heinrich Krutisch (* after 1713; † September 3, 1766 in Potsdam) worked in Sanssouci from around 1747 and was a gardener in the melonery from 1750 to 1766.
7. ^ Karoline Schulze: History of the garden administration of the Royal Gardens , 1873/74. Secret State Archive of Prussian Cultural Heritage, I. HA, Rep. 94, No. 814. Note: Karoline Schulze (1794–1881) was the daughter of the gardening director Johann Gottlob Schulze , local researcher and member of the Association for the History of Potsdam.
8. ↑ From the report of Valentin von Massow. Formerly in the Royal House Archives, Hofgärtner files (war loss). Typescript by an unknown author, possibly District Court Judge Hermann Schulte-Steinberg. In: SPSG: Nothing thrives without care , p. 214.
9. ↑ SPSG: Preußisch Grün , p. 330.
10. ↑ Clemens Alexander Wimmer : The Court Gardener's Writing Activity , in: SPSG: Preußisch Grün , p. 184.
11. ^ Wimmer: On the history of the administration of the royal gardens in Prussia . In: SPSG: Preußisch Grün , p. 55.
12. ^ Friedrich Nicolai: Description of the royal royal cities of Berlin and Potsdam, of all the peculiarities located there, and the surrounding area . Volume 3, Appendix, p. 47, Berlin 1786.
13. ↑ CCL Hirschfeld: garden calendar for the year 1784 . Third year, Kiel 1783, pp. 23–31.