Anleitung zum Gärtnerischen Planzeichnen… Mit 16 Tafeln.
2 volumes, oblong folio (28.3 x 39 cm), and 8vo (26.9 x 19.4 cm). Atlas with 16 full-page plates (including 12 in rich original color) with separately published and often missing octavo text volume ([2] pp. blank, [4], 1-38 pp., [2] pp. of advertisements, [2] pp. blank with in-text engravings) secured to inside front cover with a later linen sleeve. Bound in publisher’s boards with title printed on front cover, rebacked with linen. Some scattered foxing to first plate in atlas volume; otherwise colored plates generally bright and fresh. A manual for drawing garden plans by Friedrich August Ernst “Fritz” Encke (1861-1931), a German garden architect and educator, who designed a number of important parks and gardens in Germany, particularly in Cologne in his role as the city's Parks Director from 1903. At the time of the publication of this work, Encke was instructor of garden design at the Royal Gardening School at the Wildlife Park near Potsdam. Founded in 1823 by the celebrated garden architect Peter Joseph Lenné (1789-1866), the school's aim was to prepare gardeners for work in Prussian royal gardens. The three-year program offered by the institution marked a shift from gardening as an amateur practice to gardening as a profession based on scientific principles. Encke is well-known as one of the most important representatives of the early twentieth-century garden reform movement in Germany, which opposed the ideas of Peter Joseph Lenné and Gustav Meyer (the so-called “Lenné-Meyer” school) in garden design dominant in Germany throughout most of the nineteenth century. Encke and his colleagues advocated for the creation of socially functional green spaces in the city in contrast to picturesque wild nature gardens. In Anleitung zum Gärtnerischen Planzeichnen, however, Encke "still adheres to the so-called wildlife park style of the Meyer's school and uses details from Potsdam's gardens as examples" (Wimmer, p. 16). The work consists of separate text and plate volumes. “Most young gardeners with a good education are regrettably unskilled in freehand drawing,” Encke writes (vol. 1, p. 8). He provides comprehensive instructions on how to draw garden plans, covering such topics as scale, shadowing, colors, how to make corrections (“beginners find corrections to the finished plans alarming, yet with some practice such changes can be made so neatly that they might be uncovered only through careful examination” (vol. 1, p. 29)) and many others. The sixteen plates comprising the atlas volume further dissect the complex art of illustrating gardens into its composite parts. Plates IV, VI and VII demonstrate how to use different shades of the color green to depict trees, hedges, and bushes as well as their shadows. Several other plates offer detailed schematic views of parks in Potsdam: the Orangery Garden (plate XI) and the Charlottenhof Park (Plates XII-XIII)--both UNESCO world heritage sites.
* “Encke, Friedrich August Ernst (known as Fritz),” in A Dictionary of Architecture and Landscape Architecture (3 ed.); Uwe Schneider, “Hermann Muthesius and the Introduction of the English Arts & Crafts Garden to Germany,” Garden History 28/1 (2000), pp. 57–72; C.A. Wimmer, “Geschichte Des Gärtnerischen Planzeichnens. Anhand von Lehrbüchern in Der Gartenbaubücherei,” Zandera 8/1 (1993), pp. 1–24.
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