The joint efforts of two acknowledged experts were likely indispensable for this protagonist in Hanover’s eighteenth-century history. Anyone who turns to the former Electoral–Royal Chief Director of Court Building and Gardens, Friedrich Karl von Hardenberg (1696–1763), and his wide-ranging interests quickly realizes the scale of the task. More than ten years of scholarly research on this compelling historical figure unite Marcus Köhler, Professor of the History of Landscape Architecture and Garden Heritage Conservation at TU Dresden, and the architectural historian Bernd Adam. In a joint lecture at Leibniz University Hannover on Thursday, 4 June 2025, they presented their latest research findings at the invitation of the Centre for Garden Art and Landscape Architecture (CGL) and Inken Formann.
Rich in images and material, the audience learned about the experiences of the inquisitive Hardenberg during his ten-month journey through England in 1744/45—information gleaned from his diary notes, whose value as sources had long been underestimated. Viewed through the lens of cultural transfer and the import of both theoretical and very practical ideas from the island kingdom to Electoral Hanover, these notes constitute a unique body of material from the Age of Enlightenment. They complement other surviving ego-documents of the nobleman and complete the picture of an ambitious civil servant who rendered notable services to the modernization of the polity and the promotion of the sciences.
A challenging source edition for editors and readers alike
Hardenberg’s notes—written in four languages, including words unfamiliar to him and therefore rendered phonetically, with Latin interspersed—are extremely terse and at times cryptic. Nonetheless, they convey precise observations. Their style is sober, largely without context and marked by omissions; reported in a staccato manner, as they were intended merely to support memory rather than for publication. In places, the author supplemented the written word with vivid sketches, marked with letters referring back to the text. By their own account, Köhler and Adam were repeatedly challenged to grasp references and to identify the author’s curiosity about particular matters.
Some of Hardenberg’s pen strokes could not be deciphered for the source edition published at the end of 2024. According to Köhler, “the reading is not meant to be read straight through, but to be browsed.” Alongside the notes, the publication includes maps of travel routes, a list of expenses, and a register of the people the court official met in England and elsewhere. “It is a who’s who of the eighteenth century,” Köhler remarks. Electoral Hanover, he adds, was by no means “a provincial backwater.”
After an unsuccessful start as a councillor of the chamber, George II (1683–1760), King of Great Britain and Ireland and Elector of Hanover, appointed Hardenberg—who came from an old, widely branched noble family of civil servants and military officers—in 1741 to head a court building and garden department tailored specifically to him. These two fields defined the focus of the England journey, but they also opened up many further insights. Hardenberg encountered, among other things, garden art, botany, and architecture; bridge building and engineering; urban planning and infrastructure; natural sciences, mathematics, and navigation; art, music, literature, and theatre; the history of science; politicians and diplomats; estate management, horse breeding and hunting; as well as social issues and court gossip.
“Kent … wants everything wild” – Hardenberg as a witness to a garden art in transition
Köhler and Adam repeatedly traced direct connections from England to Electoral Hanover, for example in the field of garden art. This includes Hardenberg’s visit to Euston Hall, the seat of the Duke of Grafton, where he also met William Kent (1685–1748). Kent, an artist of multiple talents, stood at the beginning of a new garden fashion emanating from England that was starting to supplant the formal Baroque style. As an early witness from continental Europe, Hardenberg thus encountered park landscapes in a transitional phase toward newly developed landscape designs.
“Kent, a painter and a good architect, who loves the simple old art, wants everything wild and only to assist nature in those things which she has not herself provided. He had proper old avenues cut down and made clumps here and there; likewise clumps in the main avenue, where at the entrance he proposed to build a portal, as well as a building in front of the icehouse on an elevation with a small room and two beside it, which was quite elegant.”
(entry of 17 October 1744)
For the benefit of Electoral Hanover: impulses from many fields of interest
From this “icehouse,” Kent gave the visitor from Hanover a sketch, which only a few years later would inspire the construction of a belvedere pavilion in the former kitchen garden of Linden near Hanover (today a city district). The beginnings of the garden revolution demonstrably left traces in Hardenberg’s thinking. He visited many English country estates and, as it emerged, with some of his topographical sketches in the travel diary even transmitted otherwise undocumented design states (for example at Wolterton Hall and Holkham Hall).
He showed a particular fondness for contemporary developments in architecture and for construction techniques. The commented transcription by Köhler and Adam of the England journey notes: “While most other German states at this time still primarily cultivated traditional artistic ties to Italy and France, the personal union in Hanover fostered an early and fruitful reception of English ideas. Under Hardenberg, Hanover thus formed around 1740 a centre of building culture that exerted a clear influence across northern Germany.”
Hardenberg embodied the type of an enlightened universal scholar, distinguished by comprehensive education, a love of travel, wide-ranging networks, and interdisciplinary interests—for the benefit of Electoral Hanover. His estate, distributed across several archives in Germany, ranks among the important sources for the cultural history of the eighteenth century. Politically, he was less successful: on a mission to Paris in 1741 during the War of the Austrian Succession, he failed in his task of negotiating a neutrality treaty. France would have accepted this only in exchange for substantial British concessions, and Hanover subsequently remained a military target. In 1762 Hardenberg was appointed Privy Councillor and President of War, but he died the following year
