Historical Court Garden Öhringen Spaces for the future. Building with the landscape.

Öhringen used the 2016 State Garden Show as an opportunity to launch a long-term, high-quality green and open space framework for the development of the city. Our planning for the garden show included core areas in the middle of the city and correspondence areas far into the adjacent landscape. With careful interventions we enhanced the landscape characteristics, improved and guided the use.
The tasks were enormously diverse for planners and executing companies. The area spans the arch between historical park, over renaturation in the water, up to the extensive landscape park. Between careful reconstruction of past garden art and over-shaping of agriculturally used surfaces, between petting zoo and Skateanlage, between Landart and Limestor lie the challenges, which mastered the participants of the horticultural show in the past years. As a result, the city of Öhringen has developed the open space close to the city for the coming decades.
The overall area is divided into four sub-areas, which are threaded along the course of the Ohrn River. The Hofgarten, a historic park in the city center; the Cappelrain, a natural area where the Ohrn has been renaturalized with a new meander; the Cappelaue, formerly agricultural land; and the Hofgut Cappel, another historic garden area. Three new bridge structures will connect the areas along the Ohrn even better in the future.

The Hofgarten
The design focus of the Hofgarten is on dealing with the historic heritage in a contemporary way. The design had to balance and mediate between the goals of historic preservation, conservation, and the creation of a vibrant and vital place for residents. While some parts of the parks have been reconstructed, others have been complemented by a contemporary design. New design elements should always be "readable" as such.
When one enters the Hofgarten, the urban heart of Öhringen's inner city, one notices that it can no longer be clearly assigned to any one style epoch. Elements of the English landscape park can be found as well as elements of baroque garden art. Together with the State Office for the Preservation of Historical Monuments, a guiding condition was defined according to which the individual elements were reconstructed and restored. The conservation picture was oriented towards the "landscape baroque garden" of the early 19th century.
The handling of the centuries-old, but partly very dilapidated tree population posed a special challenge. The two space-shaping avenues in the northern part could not be preserved due to their vitality and were completely replanted. For this purpose, 64 hornbeams up to 25 years old were planted.
A highlight is the new courtyard garden staircase that connects the higher castle with the actual garden. The architecture based on the model of a ski jump has a dynamic effect, the golden paint does justice to the princely context of the complex.
In the area of a former kitchen garden, a hedge-lined garden space was created, the Generation Garden. By relocating the existing playground to the adjacent Allmandwiese in the west of the park, the rectilinear basic structure of the historic path figure could be largely reconstructed. In contrast to the outer path structure, the inner, strictly orthogonal structure of the kitchen garden is not reconstructed. Intensively planted raised beds, a water table, a small children's playground as well as two wooden decks are grouped in free form on a square-like, water-bound ground surface. The arrangement of the 50 cm high wooden decks allows the two existing, valuable wing nut trees to be gently integrated into the garden area. Their special habitus shapes the future character of the garden.