Stiftung Insel Hombroich

To showcase his art coll­ec­tion, Karl-Heinrich Müller wanted a garden that was as beautiful as Claude Monet’s in Giverny. When he was looking for a suitable site in the early 1980s, he came upon a historic park just outside the city gates of Neuss, bordered by offshoots of the Erft river. It was part of the former country house of the de Weerths, an indus­tria­list family from Wuppertal, which was built in 1816 and is now known as the Rosa Haus. The area was in the style of Maxi­mi­lian Weyhe’s English landscape gardens but had become wild and overgrown. It was also home to an old stock of rare trees including several copper beeches, a court oak and a bald cypress that measured 35 metres high with a five-metre trunk circum­fe­rence. After a bypass channel for the Erft river had been dug around 1900, the park was surrounded by water, leading it to be known as ‘Insel Hombroich’, literally ‘Hombroich Island’.

Karl-Heinrich Müller fell in love with the site and commis­sioned landscape architect Bernhard Korte with the task of rede­sig­ning the park. The original unspoilt state appealed greatly to Korte, who restored the area based on ideal-typical concep­tions: “The rugged­ness helped to capture the spiri­tua­lity of the Erft wetlands. My aim was to embrace the spon­ta­neous, random, chaotic forces of nature while revi­si­ting the old design.” He restored the overgrown struc­tures, procured prehis­toric plant stocks and combined them with the existing exotic bushes, while also planting new additions.

Landscape concept

In 1984, Karl-Heinrich Müller bought 14 hectares of nearby land – inten­si­vely farmed arable land and sugar beet fields that had been ferti­lised with manure. During his research, Korte disco­vered that a buried bypass channel, 500 metres in length, had existed circa 10,000 BC together with what appeared to be a wide range of plant life. He reac­ti­vated this and other original waterways, formed small lakes out of them and planted their banks with wetland vege­ta­tion that was typical of the Lower Rhine area.

In 1992, the museum founder bought a further five hectares of land, consis­ting of fields on a gravel terrace above the flood­plains. As with the landscape design down in the flood­plains, Korte began by rese­ar­ching the struc­tures and the history of the place. The presence of an adjacent farm that had been mentioned as far back as the 15th century indicated that this had been arable farmland for centuries. As well as this, a map of the area drawn by Jean Joseph Tranchot in 1807 docu­mented the existence of farmland and orchards on the terrace and of willows in the flood­plains. When designing the entire area beyond the old park, Korte modelled his ideas on this bucolic landscape.

He planted walnut trees on the terrace, a chestnut and lime tree avenue and a wild farm garden with persimmon, rare crab apple varieties, figs, kiwis and Virginia creeper. As Bernhard Korte explained: “I wanted a landscape with great clarity and ratio­na­lity, with meadows, waterways and bodies of water juxta­posed in a way that made good sense. And I wanted the imported willow-tree sculp­tures from Belgium to be distri­buted in the same well thought-out way. Here, rather than a mathe­ma­ti­cally defined area, was a symbiosis beneath the sky dome – a holistic landscape that derived its form from the weight­iness of vertical elements such as archi­tec­ture, hedges and trees but also from the rela­ti­onship between the horizon and the meadows, paths and the various bodies of water.”

Naturalness and care

When Burkhard Damm took over as head landscape architect in Hombroich in 2001, he remained true to Korte’s basic ideas. His approach was also to interfere as little as possible with nature. As he once put it: “In Hombroich, gardening means deli­bera­tely not taking action in order to do the right thing at the right time”. He also believed that “the landscape in Hombroich should always appear self-evident”.

Damm supple­mented the plantings in the old park with special additions like the Persian ironwood at the peak of the Erft river, various rare ferns and magnolias, several maple trees, blad­dernut, Oriental paperbush and mahonias: “My gardening work is all centred on the firm belief that we are creating a habitat here for flora, fauna and humans in which they are all given the space that is due to them.”

This approach has remained largely unchanged to this day: nature is still allowed to take its course, with steps only taken if abso­lutely necessary and with the utmost care. For example, the willow trees need regular pruning or they will break. And without the necessary coun­ter­me­a­sures, exotic species like bald cypress, turkey oak, tulip tree, southern catalpa, arbor­vitae or cedar would be displaced by native species such as maple, elder, sedge and nettle. In other words, most steps that are taken are to offset compe­ti­tion. By contrast, when thick branches in the old park rot and trees jut into ponds, this is all part of the natural process. Change – tran­si­tional stages like seed pods or fallen leaves and plants dying by natural means – is an important part of the horti­cul­tural philo­sophy at Hombroich.