Belvedere Palace, the baroque summer residence of the von Sachsen-Weimar and Eisenach family, is located on a hill south of Weimar in the middle of a spacious park.
The showpiece of this beautiful complex is an orangery.
Orangery - this is what historically representative gardens for citrus plants are called, but also the greenhouses in which these plants spend the cold season.
We owe the ability to switch between outside and inside to the planter, a human invention that is hugely underestimated in its sustainability and which goes back to André Le Nôtre (1613 to 1700), the star gardener of Versailles.
Rainer Hank
Freelance writer in the economy of the Frankfurter Allgemeine Sonntagszeitung.
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Hundreds of bitter orange trees were part of the orangery of the Weimar Belvedere in the best of times.
They were an expression of a hope for the return of the Golden Age, visible in the symbol of the evergreen citrus plants that also bear fruit and flowers.
We are told that pomegranates, figs and coffee trees were also grown here.
Adaptation beats apocalypse
All of this served to make the importance and wealth of a baroque court visible. And it was a place of science. The lord of the castle, Duke Karl August von Sachsen-Weimar (1757 to 1828), spent large sums of money on exotic plants. The Duke and his star minister Johann Wolfgang von Goethe pursued their botanical passions here, and so exotic species from all over the world found their way into the plant collection of a small German state. Belvedere was particularly famous for its collection of Cape and New Holland plants, i.e. plants from South Africa and Australia. A particularly successful example of botanical globalization, if you will.
When we strolled through the Weimar Orangery with friends again last weekend, not only but also on the occasion of Goethe's birthday, we noticed that the winter garden was of course heated. From the beginning, such rooms were equipped with several iron stoves. Otherwise the Mediterranean and exotic plants of the south would not have survived the harsh climate of Thuringia. Should I be asked in the future for a role model for a successful adaptation to climate change, I would rave about the orangeries of the baroque age and praise the wealth of ideas of the aristocracy ruling at the time and their scientific advisors. This shows very specifically that human creativity and technical ingenuity can bring together what by nature does not belong together: 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 - proactively, as they say today - oppose it. Adaptation beats apocalypse.