2023-07-26 17:01:43
It’s like Safari. Anne-Grit Reichelt puts on her ranger hat and opens the dusty car door. The heat builds up in the company vehicle, although only the morning sun is burning on it. The journey goes past savannah-yellow meadows and the Great Lake, which without a body of water is hardly recognizable as such.
In the dry plain lies a leafy branch that was torn off by a hurricane. Some trees stretch leafless crowns into the sky. The old beech hall forest that covers the slopes of the 77 meter high Babelsberg has become light.
Reichelt knows her Potsdam area like no other. Unlike the administrators of the historic buildings of the Prussian Palaces and Gardens Foundation, she cannot adorn herself with the title castellan, but as department head she is responsible for a living world cultural heritage site: the Babelsberg Palace Park. And “climate change hit it with full force,” she says – with violent storms, long periods of drought, sudden heavy rainfall.
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She has been working in the 124-hectare park for a good 15 years and has observed increasing “complex damage” since 2015/16 at the latest. This affects many listed parks with old trees.
“If the neighbor breaks away, then the red beeches have a particularly hard time,” explains Reichelt on the drive. Sunlight is now shining in where the roof of the forest once formed a permanent shadow zone. This has a variety of effects, not just on the beeches themselves, whose thin bark does not tolerate the sun. Also on their seedlings, which can only thrive in the shade, or on introduced species such as the black locust or the black cherry, which are spreading, or the oak jewel beetle, which has recently felt wonderfully at home here.
Many trees have lost their power reserve
Reichelt points to a dried-up crown. Trees are dying from above: “Even oak trees have been affected by the dying process for two years,” she says, while a drone hovers above us recording the damage from a bird’s eye view. “Trees actually have a good reserve of strength, but now many have lost it because they have to brave the changing climate conditions.”
View of Babelsberg Palace in Potsdam
Source: picture alliance / Westend61/Werner Dieterich
She is particularly concerned about the unexpected greenwood demolitions, if only for reasons of visitor protection. When trees “recognize” that they can no longer adequately supply their crowns, healthy branches are “thrown off”, complains Reichelt.
Norbert Kühn hears this complaint “that trees are dying, especially the solitary ones”. “But we don’t know the extent of the damage.” The professor for vegetation technology and plant use at the Technical University of Berlin is currently collecting a parking damage report. Similar to the annual forest condition report, it is intended for the first time in Germany to “take stock of how the past four years of heat and drought have affected the condition of the trees in public parks and gardens”.
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The recording is not yet complete, but it turns out that around 60 percent of the trees examined are damaged in some way, reports Kühn. Unlike in the forest or forest, where the “trees are harvested”, there are very old plants in the park.
Anne-Grit Reichelt also points out that the beech trees are already entering the critical phase of their life cycle at more than 160 years of age. The old, solitary trees in particular are also at risk because they have a large biomass that needs to be fed. “To do this, a constant flow of sap must be guaranteed,” explains Norbert Kühn, “but the deep water reservoir that is common in our latitudes has been used up in many places.”
The two dead linden trees on the wayside shrine in Babelsberg Palace Park, Potsdam
Source: Prussian Palaces and Gardens Foundation
When Prince Wilhelm of Prussia, who later became the first German Emperor, had Babelsberg Park laid out as a garden for his summer residence, the area was still characterized by deforestation during the French occupation. The first planner, the royal garden director Peter Joseph Lenné, also had problems with the reforestation. He was involved in the design and layout from 1833, but he could not cope with the hilly topography and the barren sandy soil, nor with the lack of water and poor financial resources.
The latter only improved with the prince consort Augusta von Sachsen-Weimar-Eisenach – and the ingenious Prince Herrmann von Pückler-Muskau, who took over the chief planning from Lenné from 1843. He built a water reservoir on Babelsberg and had a 25-kilometer network of cast-iron pipes laid in the park, feeding several lakes and waterfalls – pragmatically and prophetically.
180 years later, money is tight again. Only a few parts of the dilapidated pipe network have been restored, 85 percent of the park can only be watered with mobile water trucks. Necessary replanting becomes a sensitive issue. In order to strengthen the resilience of the park with all its biotopes, they are more urgent than ever in the face of climate change.
But how? And what to plant? Garden monument conservators and park managers, ecologists and conservationists can have fundamentally different views on this question. Turkey oak and sweet chestnut, which are actually native to the Mediterranean region, are better adapted to climate change than birch and copper beech, agrees Anne-Grit Reichelt. But she still doesn’t want to see these trees in her territory. Her credo: Not only are they replanted at the same location, but always with the same species. “Pückler would not have planted any sweet chestnuts either.”
Field research in the historical park
Reichelt has therefore created two test fields and planted native species from the park – such as small-leaved lime, field maple, cornus – to check: “Which plants can do without water?” And indeed: In the “Black Sea” pond with plenty of algae from Pückler’s ornamental pond. mulched furrows some quite robust looking shrubs sprout. It’s literally field research – with the aim of setting up your own tree nursery in the park.
A measure that the agricultural scientist also advises. Incidentally, Norbert Kühn certainly gives beech a chance, but less so for larch or spruce. Among the boreal conifers there are species that no longer function. But garden preservationists could find trees of a similar character, for example from the Mediterranean region. “You will have to ask yourself these questions in order to achieve greater climate resilience,” says Kühn: “Can I replace the larch with a cedar?”
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It is important to see a palace park not only against the background of art history, but also as part of a biological system. “We will lose the usual park images because the park is naturally rejuvenating,” Reichelt also knows. “But we want to preserve the historical pictures that Pückler painted.” When it comes to preserving a living asset like a park, you have to remain flexible. “It becomes problematic,” says Reichelt, “when the solitary trees that frame these pictures are removed.”
The “lost copper beech” – an important backdrop tree for the so-called bowling green in front of Babelsberg Palace in the line of sight to the Havel – which was not up to the climate changes, Reichelt has recovered Fagus sylvatica purpurea replaced. The delicate little tree with the dark red foliage will now be tested by drought and heat for several decades until it can once again obscure the well-known view of the water as picturesquely as it once did. After all: It is a real Pückler-Muskau, the blood beech seedling comes from the Branitz landscape park.
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