Reading with pictures with Dr Angela Pfennig | Stralsund, KulturDIELE M8, Mönchstraße 8 | Admission: 10 euros

In 1811, Hermann Prince von Pückler-Muskau (1785-1871) took over the Muskau estate. In 1814, he travelled to England, where he studied the English landscape parks intensively for the first time and discovered his vocation as a garden artist.

At the time, England was still regarded as an unrivalled role model in landscape garden design due to its almost universal idealisation of nature through art. Pückler felt the need for wealthy lords of the manor in Germany to combine beauty with utility when designing their country estates, "albeit without slavish imitation, more in spirit than in form, and always appropriate to the location."

After returning to Muskau in 1815, Hermann Prince von Pückler-Muskau began to realise his design idea for the park. He wrote his only theoretical work on garden and park design, "Andeutungen über Landschaftsgärtnerei", in 1825, which was published in 1834. This was preceded by many years of practical experience in laying out the Muskau park. It was far from Pückler's intention to "teach exhaustively" about garden design. Rather, he was prompted by "the careful observation of excellent examples, combined with a passionate love of the subject and the serious study of the best works on garden art ... to give some useful hints", which were intended to inspire both experts and laymen alike.

The reading characterises the dazzling, stimulating, often provocative and in any case controversial personality of Prince von Pückler-Muskau and illustrates the prince's design principles for landscaped parks and gardens using various examples of garden art.