Poensgenpark

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Poensgenpark - landscape park part: View of the large meadow

The Poensgenpark (also called Cromford Park ) is one of the most famous parks in Ratingen . As an example of a "late landscape park" at the turn of the 20th century, it is one of the special cultural treasures in the Rhineland. Formerly a private park, it has been open to the public since 1977. He has been a member of the street art garden between the Rhine and Maas association since 2005 and has been a listed building since 1997 .

history

Brügelmann baroque garden

The park's earliest origins date back to 1790: Johann Gottfried Brügelmann , founder of the Cromford textile factory , laid it out as a baroque garden with the participation of the then young garden architect Maximilian Friedrich Weyhe . Today only the small chestnut avenue leading to the manor house reminds of this old park.

Private use by the Poensgen family

1906 acquired Commerce Carl Poensgen , former partner of the Düsseldorf Tube and iron rolling mills AG vorm. Poensgen , the property of his son-in-law Moritz Brügelmann and in 1907 had Düsseldorf garden architect Reinhold Hoemann design a park based on the English model. Hoemann had previously designed the forest park around the “Elisenhof” forest estate near Koblenz-Arenberg by Albert Poensgen , cousin of Carl Rudolf. At the upper end of the park, on a terrace slightly elevated above the rough terrain on today's Brügelmannweg, Kommerzienrat Poensgen had a house built by the architects Kayser & von Groszheim from Düsseldorf in 1907/1908. This “Angerhaus” can best be assigned to the so-called reform movement that shaped the architectural style from 1900 to 1920.

In 1914, the area northwest of the Anger was supplemented by a wooded area in which a burial place for the Brügelmann family can be found. After the park founder died in 1921, his eldest son Ernst Poensgen , who had followed in his father's footsteps, took over the property. Ernst Poensgen was one of the outstanding personalities in Rhenish-Westphalian economic history and from 1935 to 1943 chairman of the board of directors and, since 1944, of the supervisory board of Vereinigte Stahlwerke AG , at times the largest German mining company. In this function, he sold several parts of his father's park to the United Steel Works between 1939 and 1941.

Owned by the United Steel Works

On March 22, 1945, shortly before the end of World War II , the Allies bombed the nearby Cromford textile factory. 23 bombs also fell in Poensgenpark. The Angerhaus and the entire house garden were destroyed, and everyone in the house at that time was killed. Only a group of putti and a sandstone staircase have survived from the original structural and figurative furnishings of the house garden .

The United Steel Works (VSt) were already considering the sale of the Poensgen landscape garden in the early 1950s and then became more specific in 1954. Under the unbundling of the German iron and steel industry demanded by the Allies after the Second World War (based on Act No. . 27 of the Allied High Commission) also and especially the United Steel Works fell. Most of the land that VSt still owned in Ratingen on March 31, 1954, was transferred to successor companies by 1955. The Poensgenpark and some other parcels were sold with a contract dated March 1, 1955. After Dr. Walter Rohland , member of the board of directors of the VSt, had already acquired a plot of land at Brügelmannweg 10 (later under the address Schillerstraße 17) in 1951, and only a few years later he tried to buy the park opposite. In doing so, he relied on a privately written right of first refusal which the VSt had guaranteed him for the area west of Brügelmannweg. Rohland had the park restored and partially redesigned according to the suggestions of the garden architect Lutz Schreiber from Aachen, including a bathing garden with a small private indoor swimming pool and a guest house, and the millstone , which is still there today and which he had chiseled, set up at the exit point of the Anger which countries in the world he had traveled in which years.

Public use

The park has been open to the public since 1977. After Rohland's death, the civil engineering contractor Bernhard Wieler from Ratingen acquired the park in 1982 and the city of Ratingen in 1984.

In 1995 the landscape architects Rose and Gustav Wörner created a park maintenance facility, as a result of which the park was listed in 1997 and the hill of the former Angerhaus was redesigned as a rose and shrub garden. In 2005, the Poensgenpark was included as an excellent park in the street of garden art between the Rhine and the Maas .

The park was badly hit by the storm on Whit Monday 2014 . Numerous trees were badly damaged; the park could not be entered for several months. The Rheinische Post reports on damage that would be around 500,000 euros. As a result of the storm, the largest and most famous tree in the park with a height of 25 m and a crown diameter of 36 m, an approx. 100 year old Atlas cedar, was felled on November 7, 2017 . Previously, a specially founded citizens' initiative had resisted and, among other things, submitted an expert opinion that, contrary to the expert opinion commissioned by the city, considered preserving the tree possible and sensible.

The Kastanienallee (2006)

The large Kastanienallee on the southern edge of the park also had to be completely felled in 2017/2018.

Tulip tree avenue planted as a replacement (2019)

As a replacement, 38 tulip trees were planted in 2019 in place of the previous horse chestnuts because of the threat from leaf miners .

Park structure

Today the park contains over 120 species of wood; many of them come from distant continents and require a lot of space, which is why they are rarely found in European green spaces.

Today, as yesterday, the Poensgen Park is essentially divided into three areas: the area of ​​the former Angerhaus including the house garden, the landscape park underneath, characterized by large lawns with solitary trees and bushes, and the forest area to the right of the Anger .

Angerhaus and house garden

The Angerhaus stood on the hill at the southwestern end of the park until it was destroyed in 1945. Its corners are now marked by four rainbow-effect steles designed by the artist Reinhard M. Görs. Directly northeast of this is the former house garden, which today contains the only part of the park that is not open to the public. Here is a former private bath house and a tool shed for the city gardeners ("grape house"). The City of Ratingen is considering demolishing both houses and redesigning the area.

Landscaped garden

The historic stone staircase leads from the hill to the largely English-style part of the park, which extends to the Anger and is lined with a tulip tree avenue to the left, from which one has a view of the Wasserburg Haus to the house .

The spacious meadow area is loosened up in some places by several rare, large, exotic trees and bushes, which in Europe are rarely found in parks and in the wild due to their space requirements. Especially striking here are the Parrotie ⊙ with a diameter of over 20 m, which is very popular with children as a climbing tree, a wing Nussbaum , a South American catalpa , a Judas tree , a Chinese dove tree ⊙ , a North American Giant sequoia ⊙ and three copies of extinction threatened black poplars ⊙ . Another specialty is the primeval sequoia ⊙ , which until its discovery in 1941 in a remote mountain region of China was only known from fossil finds.

Forest part

View of the wooded part of the park along the Anger

Beyond the Anger, which runs through the park and is crossed by three bridges, is the most natural part of the park, which is almost without lawns and is made up of many trees and therefore has a forest-like character. It is criss-crossed by several footpaths and stretches along the Anger much further upstream to about the level of the Brügelmann manor.

The oldest path in the park is also located on this part, today's Ahornallee, which was already shown on maps in 1786 as "Lindenallee". At that time it led from today's Mülheimer Straße past the Brügelmann manor over the Anger to Junkernbusch. There is also a small refuge on Ahornallee.

swell

  1. ↑ Archived copy ( memento of the original dated September 23, 2017 in the Internet Archive ) Info: The archive link was inserted automatically and has not yet been checked. Please check the original and archive link according to the instructions and then remove this notice. @1@ 2Template: Webachiv / IABot / www.guelcher-chronik.de
  2. ↑ Ratinger and Angerländer Heimatverein (ed.): Die Quecke No. 76, December 2006
  3. ↑ http://www.rp-online.de/nrw/staedte/ratingen/der-alte-poensgenpark-ist-voellig-verwuestet-aid-1.4309824
  4. ^ Atlas cedar in Poensgenpark, Ratingen. In: monumentaltrees.com. Retrieved August 14, 2019 .
  5. ↑ The Atlas cedar is felled! Friends of Poensgenpark e. V., accessed on August 14, 2019 .
  6. ^ Norbert Kleeberg: City falls old cedar in Poensgenpark . In: Rheinische Post . November 10, 2017 ( rp-online.de ).
  7. ^ City renews avenue in Poensgenpark . In: Rheinische Post . February 23, 2018 ( rp-online.de ).
  8. ↑ a b c Norbert Kleeberg: Ratingen: Allee for the Poensgenpark is ready. In: Westdeutsche Zeitung. September 26, 2019, accessed September 26, 2019 .

Web links

Commons : Poensgenpark  - collection of images, videos and audio files

literature

  • Andrea Niewerth: The Poensgenpark in Ratingen. 100 years of park history 1907–2007. Klartext-Verlag 2007, ISBN 3-89861-682-7
  • Wolfgang Schepers : Nature, Landscape and Industry. The Cromford parks against the background of the German garden theory around 1800. In: Cornelia Frings u. a. (Red.), Landschaftsverband Rheinland, Rheinisches Industriemuseum (Hrsg.): "The desolate area was transformed into a pleasure garden ...". On the industrial architecture of the Cromford textile factory 1783–1977 . Landschaftsverband Rheinland, Rheinisches Industriemuseum, publications; 5. Cologne 1991, pp. 120-134. ISBN 3-7927-1201-6
  • Gisela Schöttler: Green jewel Poensgenpark . In: Association Lintorfer Heimatfreunde (ed.): The Quecke . No. 72, 2002, pp. 9-11.
  • Hans Junker: The Poensgen Park in Ratingen . City of Ratingen, Ratingen 1977.
  • Manfred Fiene: 100 years of Poensgenpark A chance for the preservation of garden monuments and cultural tourism . In: Association Lintorfer Heimatfreunde (ed.): The Quecke . No. 77, 2007, pp. 3-8.
  • Andrea Niewerth: 100 years Poensgenpark. New knowledge about the genesis of Ratinger Poensgenpark . In: Association Lintorfer Heimatfreunde (ed.): The Quecke . No. 77, 2007, pp. 9-13.
  • Annette Schwabe: Animal species in the Poensgenpark . In: Association Lintorfer Heimatfreunde (ed.): The Quecke . No. 77, 2007, pp. 14-15.

Coordinates: 51 ° 18 ′ 20 ″  N , 6 ° 51 ′ 0 ″  E