A garden like a small park

Swimming pond with a bathing house, a second pond in the meadow, a columned pavilion and wire-mesh figures – a Penzberg garden made up of several places.

Location	Penzberg
Size	–
Design	Jan Vandebotermet (site manager)
Implementation	Fuchs baut Gärten GmbH – Gärtner von Eden
Photography	Miquel Tres

“You don’t come to this garden to sit in one spot – you wander between places.”

— Fuchs baut Gärten

Most gardens have one centre. This one has several – and that is exactly its idea. On a park-like plot at the edge of the forest you will find a swimming pond with a bathing house, a second, larger pond in the meadow, a white columned pavilion with a laid table and a birch grove with loungers. You don’t come to this garden to sit in one spot – you wander between places.

The swimming pond has a natural-style setting: gravel banks, boulders, a reed zone that cleans the water, and a timber deck with a ladder. Its big brother in the meadow is calmer – a jetty, nothing else. Two bodies of water with two purposes: one for swimming, one for looking at.

The swimming pond in numbers

From our construction and maintenance records for this project.

Pond area	approx. 310 m² (liner), 53 m of shoreline
Construction	Concrete wall, clad with sheet metal
Water purification	Plant filter in the integrated regeneration zone, phosphate filter
Surface cleaning	wildlife-friendly Biotop skimmer
Return flow	as a stream over boulders
Technology	automatic water level control; underwater cleaning robot since 2016
Lighting	four underwater floodlights, above-water spots

All of this was built in 2011 and planted in spring 2012, and the major extension followed as early as 2013 – that area alone has around 1,800 m² of turf, kept in shape by a robotic mower ever since. The levels are held by dry stone walls made of quarry stone (around 95 m²) with quarry stone steps, and the paths are granite small-sett paving 8/10, laid in rows and arcs – roughly 200 m² of surfacing with 240 metres of edging. There is also a sauna with a green roof and a hornbeam archway as a green garden gate.

The planting comprises over 270 items and gives the park its formal character: over 400 lavender plants in three varieties, a parterre of clipped shrubs (back in 2012 still planted with box in the classic way), Japanese maples in several varieties, the ornamental cherry ‘Kanzan’, flowering dogwood, hydrangeas from ‘Annabelle’ to ‘Limelight’ and over 300 cranesbills. Since completion, the garden’s maintenance has been in our hands without interruption – it is the only way a formal garden stays formal.

And then there are the residents: life-size wire-mesh figures sitting on the natural stone wall and looking out over the garden. Art in the garden is tricky – too much of it quickly becomes a sculpture park. Here it works because the figures are transparent: they hold their place without hiding the plants behind them. Add roses, dahlias in orange and pink and a vegetable garden with gravel paths – a park is allowed to yield a harvest too.

What you can learn from this garden

Large plots rarely fail because of money, and often because of structure: a huge expanse of lawn with everything important clinging to its edge. Here it is solved the other way round – the places are spread out, and the meadow is what connects them, not what is left over. Walking from the pavilion to the water, you clearly feel you are entering a different space. That is planning, not furnishing: sight lines, distances and the decision about what you don’t see from where. Find out more under consultation and planning, and on how the pond is built under swimming pond.

The photos were taken on a late summer day – between the dahlia bloom and the first autumn leaves.

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