Sturmfederscher basement garden

Sturmfederscher basement garden
The overgrown basement garden in 2006
Data
place	Dirmstein
architect	Friedrich Ludwig Sckell
Architectural style	Classicism, English garden
Construction year	Late 18th century
Floor space	about 4000 m²
Coordinates	49 ° 33 '42.6 "  N , 8 ° 14' 52.1"  E Coordinates: 49 ° 33 '42.6 "  N , 8 ° 14' 52.1"  E.

Main wing of the manor house at the southern tip of the basement garden

The Sturmfedersche Kellergarten , locally only known as the Kellergarten , in the Rhineland-Palatinate municipality of Dirmstein is one of the seven English gardens in the village and was formerly owned by the noble families Lerch von Dirmstein and Sturmfeder von Oppenweiler . On the approximately 4000 m² listed area of ​​the basement garden, which is designated as a monument zone , there are three historical buildings: the "fencing school" or "castle" , a manor house and the "bath house of the Countess von Brühl" .

Geographical location

The basement garden, separated from the Affenstein street by a sandstone wall almost two meters high, forms a triangle that is almost on the southern tip and the sides of which are roughly equal in length and measure almost 100 meters each. It is located in the upper village south of the town center, 200 meters from the from the Baroque originating Lawrence Church and in the immediate vicinity of the Eckbachs . The ensemble of the facility includes the “fencing school” or “castle” on the north-west corner, a manor house on the southern tip and the “bath house of the Countess von Brühl” on the north-east corner.

history

The area of ​​the later cellar garden including the “castle”, the predecessor of the “fencing school”, belonged to the Dirmstein knight Valentin von der Hauben in the 16th century . At that time there was the southern edge of the Dirmsteiner Oberdorf, and the southeast side of the area coincided with the village fortifications and the moat.

Valentin von der Hauben sold the property to the influential local nobleman Caspar Lerch when he married in 1602. Because Lerch was an avowed Catholic partisan in the Thirty Years' War , he had to suffer from repression at times, especially by Protestant- Swedish troops. His possessions in Dirmstein, including the "Burg", were plundered several times and some were set on fire. Another and much more lasting destruction of the building took place in 1689, when the French army laid the whole of Dirmstein to rubble in the Palatinate War of Succession .

When the Lerch family died out by name at the end of the 17th century, the cellar garden property also came into the ownership of the von Sturmfeder family, into which Caspar Lerch's daughter Maria Magdalena Dorothea had married in 1640. The new owners had the area at the (meanwhile ruinous) "castle" expanded at the beginning of the 18th century into a tree garden, which was then called the "cellar garden". The contract to transform the park into an English garden was carried out - probably shortly after 1790 - by the landscape architect Friedrich Ludwig von Sckell . He had laid out the English Garden in Munich in 1789 and also worked as a horticultural master for the southwest German family of the Sturmfeders in Oppenweiler and Trippstadt .

When the French Revolution spread to the Palatinate towards the end of the 18th century , the entire aristocratic property was expropriated and auctioned, including the cellar garden. In 1812 Joseph von Camuzi (1767–1828) acquired the site and had the classicist manor house built on the southern tip. Under him and his son Gideon (1799–1879) a relatively short heyday followed, which lasted until the second half of the 19th century and during which even the "castle" was restored after 1841, the "bath house" was built and the manor house with extensions was provided.

But in the course of time the basement garden deteriorated because it lacked expert care. Above all, wild maple trees took the place of exotic plants and gradually led to the area becoming overgrown like a jungle. As recently as the 1990s, all growing on the site fell elms the Dutch elm disease victim, a by the elm bark beetle transmitted fungal disease.

In the subsequent building of the "castle", the state fencing school of the Southwest German Fencing Association has been operated since the 1960s ; The current name of the building - "fencing school" - developed from this use. The former manor house is also leased to the fencing association. The "bath house" is rented for residential purposes.

In 2009 and 2010 the Catholic Hospital Foundation had the basement garden restored as a landscape park under the direction of the preservation of monuments and with the participation of the public sector - with the exception of the brook and pond, which would have been too expensive to rebuild. The community celebrated the completion of the work on May 28, 2010.

• Coats of arms of previous owner families
• 

  Lerch von Dirmstein

• 

  Storm spring from Oppenweiler

• 

  Camuzi

Surname

The origin of the term "basement garden" is unclear. Two explanations are possible:

The financial manager of a winery was formerly called " cellar ". The area including the ruins of the "castle" could have been left to such a "cellar" of the Sturmfeder family for management, with the result that the name "cellar garden" gradually developed.

Possibly it is also a dialect abrading of " wine press garden" . The reason for this assumption is the fact that at the time the name was created in the first half of the 18th century, the Eckbach did not flow south but west of the complex, directly in front of the (then ruinous) "castle" from south to north . Since the Sturmfeder family did not have cheap rinsing facilities for wine barrels at their actual seat, the Sturmfeder Castle in the center of the village, the uninhabitable building on Eckbach was perhaps used as a wine press house, and the associated green area could have been named " wine press garden" in this way .

investment

English garden

Today the basement garden and the historical buildings belong to the local Catholic Hospital Foundation . The institution steeped in tradition - its oldest document dates from 1543 - was already sponsored by Caspar Lerch's grandfather, who bore the same name . On May 28, 2010, the gardens, which were renovated between 2006 and 2009 and restored as faithfully as possible, were reopened. Originally it probably looked like the court judge Friedrich Schenck recorded in several watercolors in 1866 . The images are described as follows:

“ In the center of the small, roughly triangular complex is the pond fed by the brook, from which the meadow, covered with isolated trees, spreads out to the south. A resting place extends into the water on a small indentation, fenced off by trees and bushes. Both the entire complex and the pond are surrounded by a circular path that reveals picturesque views in some places between trees. Lines of sight are primarily intended across the meadow between the lake and the residential building, from the so-called castle to the residential building and from the east along the lake to the castle. Groups of trees condense the edges of the garden, frame the staged views and concentrate at the crossroads and the outer corners. The stream is crossed by small sandstone bridges that have been preserved to this day. North of the pond you can see the regular plantings of the vegetable garden mentioned in the original cadastre. In the distant view reproduced by Schenck, the silhouette of the garden is staggered with the carefully distributed and grouped, steeply rising pyramid poplars . "

- Georg Peter Karn and Ute-Konstanze Rasp in the local history

"Fencing school" or "castle"

"Fencing school" from the northwest with entrance portal to the basement garden

"Fencing school" from the southwest

The "fencing school" extends in north-south direction with the main facade facing west to the street Affenstein , while the back faces the cellar garden. Its surrounding wall meets the main facade from the south.

The building goes back to Caspar Lerch's medieval "castle", which was in ruins from 1689 until well into the 19th century. After 1841 it was rebuilt as a "garden room" in the style of neo-Gothic classicism. This is indicated by numerous elements, for example the coupled , profiled pointed arched windows with filigree muntin spacing , the pointed support joint rustica and the pointed arched frieze .

The pavilion-like building with a hipped roof has a single-storey pedestal above a high barrel-vaulted cellar, the foundations of which partly come from the ruinous previous building. The mezzanine floor is reached via a double-sided staircase in front of the northern gable wall and with a small terrace above.

The lintel of an old Renaissance portal is walled in on this terrace in the northwest area . It presents the marriage coats of arms of the Lerch-Eltz and Lerch-Brendel families, including the weathered inscription (which also appears on the north wall of Sturmfeder Castle ):

CASPAR LERCH THE THIRD VND DOROTHEA ZV ELTZ EHELEVT CASPAR LERCH THE VIRTE VND MARTHA BRENDELIN EHELEVT

To the north of the terrace there is a classical gate system made of sandstone pillars. The latticework is ornamented.

Mansion

Manor house (left, gable of the main wing) with extensions (right)

The simple classical main building of the manor house has an eaves gable roof and is two and a half stories high. It consists of two full floors and an attic with a small arched window in the south gable. The cuboid wing is almost in a north-south direction; the plastered facade with rectangular windows and console cornice faces west to the Affenstein , the back to the basement garden. Its surrounding wall meets the main facade from the north. A wire fence, which separates the property from Bleichstrasse , extends from the east to the two-storey extension with hall and greenhouse, which was built around the middle of the 19th century at a right angle to the main building. It has floor and sill belts and has a hipped roof.

"Bath house"

"Bath house of the Countess von Brühl"

On today's Bleichstrasse is the likewise classicist "Bathhouse of the Countess von Brühl". Joseph von Camuzi's daughter Henriette (1808–1883) became the second wife of the Prussian Lieutenant General Count Wilhelm Friedrich Karl von Brühl (1788–1867) in 1839 and thus acquired the title of Countess . As a summer residence for them, the bathhouse was created in the 1840s, which was previously largely shielded by trees. It is now vacant and is used as a residential building. The narrow two-storey building with a hipped roof has a console cornice and arched windows, five longitudinally and only one transversely on both floors; The dark brown soffits made of sandstone contrast with the light brown plaster . The count's marble bathtub , which was sunk in the ground floor of the house , now decorates the front garden like an oversized flower pot.

The Frankenthal painter and sculptor Walter Perron lived from 1942 to 1952 in the house that his wife had leased.

"Thick tree"

The "Big Tree", behind it the manor house

The renovated Eckbach Bridge

The area between the southern tip of the basement garden and the Eckbach is taken up by the " fat tree ", a more than two hundred year old plane tree . With a trunk circumference of about 6 and a height of more than 20 m, the mighty tree is classified as a natural monument under number ND-7332-517 .

As part of the “72-hour campaign” for the 50th anniversary of the Federation of German Rural Youth , the area around the Dicken Baum was redesigned in 1999 under the leadership of the Rural Youth Dirmstein , with particular attention to the aspects of conservation and nature conservation . After removing undergrowth and rubbish, u. a. the hexagonal wooden bench around the thick tree was renewed, ten nesting boxes were built, the wooden pedestrian bridge over the Eckbach was renovated and a 10 m long cable car was built as a play equipment across the water.

literature

• Georg Peter Karn, Ute-Konstanze Rasp: Castles and palaces in Dirmstein - Affenstein 21 - So-called Sturmfederscher Kellergarten . In: Michael Martin (Ed.): Dirmstein. Nobility, peasants and citizens . Chronicle of the Dirmstein community (=  Foundation for the Promotion of Palatinate Historical Research ). tape 6 . Self-published by the foundation, Neustadt an der Weinstrasse 2005, ISBN 3-9808304-6-2 , p. 452 ff .
• Georg Peter Karn, Ulrike Weber (arrangement): Bad Dürkheim district. City of Grünstadt, Union communities Freinsheim, Grünstadt-Land and Hettenleidelheim (=  cultural monuments in Rhineland-Palatinate. Monument topography Federal Republic of Germany . Volume 13.2 ). Wernersche Verlagsgesellschaft, Worms 2006, ISBN 3-88462-215-3 .

Individual evidence

1. ^ General Directorate for Cultural Heritage Rhineland-Palatinate (ed.): Informational directory of cultural monuments - Bad Dürkheim district. Mainz 2020, p. 27 (PDF; 5.1 MB).
2. ↑ ^{a b c} Bad Dürkheim district administration (ed.): Ordinance on placing the monument zone “Sturmfederscher Kellergarten” under protection… April 28, 1999.
3. ↑ The names Oberdorf and Niederdorf for the two settlement centers of the municipality are derived from the location above and below at the Eckbach , which flows through Dirmstein from west to east.
4. ↑ Georg Peter Karn, Ute-Konstanze Rasp: Castles and palaces in Dirmstein - Affenstein 21 - So-called Sturmfederscher Kellergarten . 2005, p. 453 .