A sort ofBelvedere Palace is the Baroque summer palace of the von Sachsen-Weimar and Eisenach families. It is located on a hill south of Weimar, in the middle of a spacious park. The display of this beautiful complex is an orange grove. Orangery-This is the name of a representative garden in the history of citrus plants, and it is also a greenhouse where these plants spend the cold season. We attribute the ability to transform inside and outside to the flower pot, a human invention that is seriously underestimated in terms of sustainability. It can be traced back to André Le Nôtre, the star gardener of the Palace of Versailles. 1700).
At its best, hundreds of bitter orange trees are part of the Orangery of the Belvedere Palace in Weimar. They express the hope for the return of the golden age, as can be seen in the symbol of evergreen trees—flowers and fruits at the same time—citrus plants. We heard that pomegranates, figs and coffee trees are also grown here.
Adapt to defeat the end of the world
All of these make the importance and wealth of the Baroque court evident. This is a scientific place. Lord Karl August von Sachsen-Weimar (1757-1828), the lord of the castle, spent a lot of money on exotic plants.The Duke and his star minister Johann Wolfgang von Goethe Pursuing their passion for plants here, exotic species from all over the world entered the plant collection of a small state in Germany. Belvedere is known for collecting Cape and New Holland plants, namely plants from South Africa and Australia. If you wish, this is a particularly successful example of plant globalization.
Every Tuesday
Last weekend, when we wandered through the Weimar Orangery again with friends, not only on Goethe’s birthday, we noticed that of course there is heating in the winter garden. From the beginning, such a room was equipped with several iron stoves. Otherwise, the southern Mediterranean plants and exotic plants will not survive the harsh climate of Thuringia. If someone asks me about my example of successfully adapting to climate change in the future, I will be full of praise for the orangery in the Baroque era and for the rich ideas of the ruling nobles and their scientific advisers. This shows very concretely that human creativity and technological ingenuity can bring together things that are not part of the natural world: tropical fruits in the north.
The moral of the citrus story: we don’t have to wait for climate change to destroy our planet. We can also-as they say today-take the initiative to oppose it. Adaptation is better than apocalypse.
