Garden @museum.de

Where birds sing and chirp today and the stream burbles, there has been a garden since the early days...

...though it wasn’t a palace garden or a park, but a kitchen garden – an area under cultivation with fruit trees and herb beds.

Take a look at your screen:

On a mid-19th century map, you can see the irregular triangle of the palace, the main castle. The area behind it is the garden, which was rather larger than it is now.

It you look over towards the palace, you can see an archway leading to the equestrian staircase. The white paved path has the occasional sandstone embedded in it. They run like a ribbon along the palace façade towards the pond. This series of sandstones marks the location of the former curtain wall. It starts at the Eulenturm – the Owl Tower, snakes along in front of the castle and ends in the prison yard.

During the GDR period, the garden wasn’t accessible; the stream was confined within a culvert, and large parts of the grounds were piled high with industrial and household waste.

There were plans to install an open air theatre in the rear part, with rows of audience seating erected on a foundation of waste. Take a look at your screen to see a sketch of the design. However, the open-air theatre was never built. Beginning in 1994, the waste was removed and the grounds rewilded

Since the spring of 2020, the informal garden has served as a public recreational area which is popular with Radeberg residents. In good weather, every bench here is occupied.