Gustav I. Adolph Fintelmann

Gustav Adolph Fintelmann , actually Adolph Gustav Fintelmann (born June 30, 1803 in Berlin ; † March 1, 1871 in Charlottenhof , Sanssouci Park , Potsdam ) was a royal court gardener and castellan on Pfaueninsel , a publicist and author of monographs on practical gardening. Its botanical author abbreviation is “ Fintelm. ".

Live and act

Gustav Fintelmann was born in Berlin as the son of the businessman Christian Carl Fintelmann, but probably spent his childhood on Pfaueninsel with his uncle, the court gardener Ferdinand Fintelmann , from the age of four . From 1819 to 1822 he trained as a gardener with him and from 1824 to 1828 went on a journey with a royal travel grant awarded by the Royal Gardening College in Schöneberg and Potsdam , which initially took him to Eisenstadt , Venice, Innsbruck and Vienna. In 1825 he spent the first five months there and visited gardens, about which he wrote travel reports with the title “Comments on the gardens around Vienna”. From June of the same year Fintelmann stayed in the Nymphenburg palace complex in Munich and moved on through Holland in October, where he was accepted into the Schneevogt commercial nursery in Haarlem in December . In addition to studying the publications of the botanist Georg Voorhelm Schneevoogt (1775–1850) on flowers, especially hyacinths , he received instructions on floriculture, fruit and vegetable forcing. During the subsequent stay in Paris he was interested in potted plants and from August 1826 to August 1827 he learned from the botanist Étienne Soulange-Bodin (1774–1846), also known as Chevalier Soulange-Bodin. The then owner of the "Fromont Park" in Ris-Orangis near Paris had, among other things, founded an institute for arable farming and a tree nursery and held public lectures on the art of horticulture. In addition, from March to June 1827, Fintelmann asked the peach gardener Alexis Lepère the Elder in the Paris suburb of Montreuil . Ä. instruct you in the cultivation of particularly fine table fruit, the so-called "French fruit growing". Gustav Fintelmann came to Karlsruhe and Düsseldorf in 1827 via Bollweiler in Alsace . For further training, the botanist Schneevoogt made it possible for him to travel to England, Ireland and Scotland to visit the parks in and near London, Dublin, Glasgow, Edinburgh and Liverpool in April 1828. During his stay he made the acquaintance of the landscape architect and garden writer John Claudius Loudon , for whose magazine The Gardener's Magazine Fintelmann later wrote reports about the Peacock Island. In October 1828 he traveled to Haarlem to inform his sponsor Schneevoogt about the findings of the advanced training and returned via Hanover, Kassel and Weimar to Pfaueninsel in December of that year, where he was given the post of senior assistant in his uncle's gardening area.

Because of the experience he had with potted plants in Paris, Fintelmann went to Paris on May 30, 1830 to accompany the inspector of the Berlin Botanical Garden , Christoph Friedrich Otto , to package and ship 42 particularly large palm trees from the collection of the banker Fulchiron in Passy and to look after other plants from Soulange-Boudin and the commercial nursery Cels in Montrouge . The plants that arrived on Peacock Island on August 22nd were part of the initial equipment of the palm house, which was completed in 1831, and are shown in paintings with interior views of the greenhouse , which the landscape painter Carl Blechen created from 1832 to 1834. After his appointment as court gardener at Paretz Palace in 1832 and in the melonerie (forcing shops) in Sanssouci Park in 1833, he succeeded his uncle Ferdinand Fintelmann in office and took over the gardening area on Peacock Island as court gardener and castellan on April 1, 1834, which he was 35 years old until he asked for his retirement in 1869 for health reasons.

In addition to the usual tasks of a court gardener, he was particularly interested in the cultivation and dissemination of leafy plants to decorate garden areas, greenhouses and interiors. On the Pfaueninsel he [tried] to unite the flora of Germany in a small island area and [...] practically carried out this idea within the bounds of possibility . In 1844 the botanist Peter Carl Bouché named a Canna cross C. fintelmamii after him and Eduard Otto named a Potentilla cross P. fintelmanni in 1849 . There was also a rose Fintelmann and a rose Madame Gustav Fintelmann . Although landscape gardening was not one of his preferences, he also laid out private gardens outside of his territory, such as at the end of 1840, under the influence of Friedrich Wilhelm IV , the garden of Villa Tummeley, Berliner Straße 29 in Potsdam, and in 1852 an English landscape garden on the estate of those of Bredow in Liepe or the Gutspark Kartzow .

Gustav Adolph Fintelmann died in 1871 in the Charlottenhof palace garden and was buried next to his wife Eulalia, who died in 1866, in a small cemetery behind the sexton of the Church of St. Peter and Paul on Nikolskoë. The marriage with Eulalia, the daughter of the Potsdam master stonemason Ludwig David Trippel, had seven children. One of them was their son Gustav Adolph , who like his father learned to be a gardener and was later appointed director of the court garden.

Writing activities and memberships

Fintelmann published his findings in plant cultivation in domestic and foreign specialist journals, such as the aforementioned The Gardener's Magazine and in the document Negotiations of the Association for Transport , published by the "Association for the Promotion of Horticulture in the Royal Prussian States", or "Berliner Gartenbauverein" for short of horticulture , in which he was general secretary from 1844 to 1848 and deputy director from 1850 to 1852. He also wrote articles in the association's own weekly journal for horticulture and botany, which was founded together with the botanist Karl Heinrich Koch in 1858, and translated articles from foreign-language gardening magazines or an entire book from English. Furthermore, Fintelmann participated in the reference work "Reference library for gardeners and gardening enthusiasts" published by Peter Joseph Lenné between 1837 and 1842, which briefly and generally comprehensibly reproduced the horticultural knowledge of the time, and was a member of the "German Pomologists Association" founded by Koch in 1860 "And corresponding member of the" Acclimatization Association for the Royal Prussian States ", which was established in 1857 and through which contacts abroad were established, including the exchange of plant seeds.

Publications (selection)

• On the Culture of the Hydrangea hortensis, as practiced in the Potsdam Gardens . In: The Gardener's Magazine, 5, 1829,
• About the application and treatment of ornamental foliage plants and their connection with climbing plants for jewelry groups . In: Negotiations of the Association for the Promotion of Horticulture, 10, 1834
• When were the first plant houses built? In: Allgemeine Gartenzeitung, 3, 1835
• Signpost on Pfaueninsel , Berlin 1837
• Wild tree cultivation: The cultivation and care of the wood plants to be raised and overwintered in Germany in the open country, both the hard and the tender , Berlin 1841
• A few remarks on the double flowers of the gardens . In: Mittheilungen über Flora, Society for Botany and Horticulture in Dresden, 3, 1843
• Translation from English by James Barnes: Letters on Horticulture , Potsdam 1846
• The peach cultivation at Montreuil near Paris . In: Negotiations of the Association for the Promotion of Horticulture, 19, 1849
• The park at Madlitz . In: Negotiations of the Association for the Promotion of Horticulture, Neue Reihe 1, 1853
• Helper and writing calendar for gardeners and gardening enthusiasts , 1855 ff
• The farmer's treasure : I. The village garden , Potsdam 1855; II. The turnips and the cattle cabbage , Potsdam undated ; III. The deepening of the arable soil , Potsdam 1859
• About crop tree planting , Potsdam 1856
• German forage grasses , Berlin 1856

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. ↑ SPSG: Preußisch Grün , p. 309.
2. ↑ SPSG: The Peacock Island . Potsdam 2000, p. 25.
3. ↑ SPSG: Preußisch Grün , p. 170.
4. ^ Carl August Bolle , in: Deutscher Garten , Heft 1, 1881, p. 431.
5. ^ Peter Carl Bouché, in: Gartenflora , 1858, Berlin, p. 149.
6. ^ Eduard Otto, in: Hamburger Garten- und Blumenzeitung, 5, 1849, p. 52 (the name is invalid).
7. ↑ Clemens Alexander Wimmer , in: SPSG: Preußisch Grün , p. 176.

Web links

Author entry and list of the plant names described for Gustav I. Adolph Fintelmann at the IPNI