Klettenberg Park
The Klettenbergpark in Cologne's Klettenberg district is a 6-hectare high-altitude park designed as a natural garden. It was created by Cologne gardening director Fritz Encke from 1905 to 1907 on the site of a 10 m deep gravel pit on Luxemburger Strasse .
The measure carried out in the course of the suburb greening at the beginning of the 20th century also served to upgrade the Klettenberg district, which is under construction and is characterized by a strong greening.
Encke deliberately created the park as a natural garden. Here the local visitor should get to know many different landscape elements and vegetation pictures of the Rhineland homeland, which are arranged here next to each other in a seemingly natural way. Heathland, the lake with bank vegetation, forest areas, a flower meadow traversed by a stream and a rock stream area with a subsequent steep drop (waterfall) are individual elements. The Rhenish basalt quarry and the slate quarry located in a kind of ravine represent geological features and characterize the didactic teaching program. Due to its asymmetrical layout and its generously laid out network of circular trails, the park differs significantly from the small-scale and ornamental formations in the Wilhelminian-era park. The only exception is the rose garden on the side of Nassestraße and Siebengebirgsallee.
rose Garden
The rose garden is regularly designed as a transition from the residential area Klettenberg to the park. The park visitor is directed straight ahead with his gaze to the viewing terrace. This path is framed by geometrically laid out beds that could correspond to the house gardens and by the rounded shapes of the arcades, which are modeled on the partly curved street layouts. The windows that once existed here enabled the association of residential buildings. The viewing terrace offers a view of the lake or the park, so that the rose garden and the landscape are connected to one another through these visual links.
A fountain that has been operated by a private foundation for some time is located in the line of sight to the lake, which was renovated in 2014 by the city of Cologne.
Financial bottlenecks and reduced nursing staff on the part of the city of Cologne meant that the rose garden had not received the care it needed for some time. The rose beds lined with ribbons of lavender were overgrown with weeds. The bushes and hornbeam arcades were no longer trimmed.
In 2014 and 2015, the city of Cologne cleared neglected, depleted roses on a number of areas. They showed no or only a few flowers and were no longer a beautiful sight. The removal of the roses was found to be very painful by many citizens. In 2015, three people from Klettenberg signed a sponsorship agreement with the city of Cologne and agreed to take care of the rose garden themselves. In return, those responsible agreed to plant new plants if the work was reliable. The three godparents, Christine Kramer, Theo Stoffele and Klaus Hartzheim found a number of comrades-in-arms through personal and press contacts, so that now usually around 10-12 people can be found in the garden every week. The active citizens are advised by a master gardener and those responsible at the municipal office for green spaces. In the spring of 2015, the used soil on 10 beds was replaced with new plant substrate and new plants were planted, thus almost restoring the original condition. Only within the curves of the arcades were no more roses planted, as there would not have been enough sun for optimal growth.
Klettenbergpark, looking north
Artificially created waterfall
The rose garden from above
literature
- Fritz Encke , Park on Klettenberg in Cöln, Die Gartenkunst 1906, 91 ( digitized version )
Coordinates: 50 ° 54 ′ 29 ″ N , 6 ° 55 ′ 17 ″ E