Guided Tour with Simeon Guttenhöfer
The estate garden in Hugoldsdorf has been used for gardening for centuries. Before 1945, it was the estate’s private garden. After the landowners were expropriated, the people living in close quarters in the two manor houses—many of whom had been displaced from the East—divided the grounds into plots. After the fall of the Berlin Wall in 1989, the house and grounds were abandoned and almost everything became overgrown. When the property was purchased in 2006 to convert it into a freehold, the standard-tree orchard, the hedges, and old groups of trees were cleared away; the garden was made usable for growing vegetables for personal consumption; and the park was generously cleared. Paths were laid out and maintained, and specific areas—a meadow, a tree, a seating area—were tended to.
For the past five years, I, Simeon Guttenhöfer, have been on site and have begun to expand vegetable cultivation, work with compost to increase fertility, tend to the orchard, and use two small mother cows to make the grounds even more open. So far, the focus has not been on economic gain, but on practice: both the art of farming down to the finest detail and working out of a love for the craft. For both, the biodynamic approach is an inexhaustible source of inspiration for me. It connects farm work to the cultural work of other local people. What might modern agriculture look like? I’m thinking about this and experimenting. You can see how these experiments play out on the guided tour—and, of course, don’t forget the historic grounds and manor house.
Admission: 9 euros
