Qualla: Herrenhausen Gardens

Herrenhausen Gardens: Introduction

Mon, 03 Aug 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Pedelecs, CC BY-SA 3.0. On 8 June 1714 an eighty-three-year-old woman was caught by a sudden downpour while walking in her garden, ran for shelter, and died in the arms of her granddaughter-in-law. Sophia, Electress of Hanover, was at that moment the heir presumptive to the throne of Great Britain, named in the Act of Settlement as next in the Protestant line. Queen Anne died on 1 August, less than two months later. Sophia had always been sceptical about the whole business - "What Parliament does one day, it undoes the next," she said of her own succession - and she turned out to be right, though not in the way she had feared. Had she outlived Anne she would have been the oldest person ever to take the British throne. Instead the crown went to her son, and what she left behind was fifty hectares of hedges.

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Image: Pedelecs | CC BY-SA 3.0

Herrenhausen Gardens: Fifty Hectares of Geometry

Mon, 03 Aug 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Thomas Fietzek, CC BY-SA 3.0. Sophia commissioned the French gardener Martin Charbonnier in 1683 to enlarge an existing plot at Herrenhausen, a few kilometres outside the city. The family's real residence was the Leine Palace downtown; this was the summer place. What Charbonnier and his successors produced ru...

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Image: Thomas Fietzek | CC BY-SA 3.0

Herrenhausen Gardens: Water Instead of a Palace

Mon, 03 Aug 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Ingo Rickmann, CC BY-SA 3.0. Sophia's husband, Ernest Augustus, intended to replace that modest house with a proper baroque palace and got as far as building the grand Gallery nearby. Their son George Louis - who in 1714 succeeded to the British throne as King George I - abandoned the project and spent the m...

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Image: Ingo Rickmann | CC BY-SA 3.0

Herrenhausen Gardens: The Philosopher on the Payroll

Mon, 03 Aug 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Pedelecs, CC BY-SA 3.0. Leibniz arrived in Hanover at the end of 1676 to serve the House of Brunswick - running the library, writing the dynasty's history, and from 1677 holding the post of privy counsellor of justice, which he kept for the rest of his life. He stayed forty years. Sophia was among the v...

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Image: Pedelecs | CC BY-SA 3.0

Herrenhausen Gardens: 1943, and 2013

Mon, 03 Aug 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Misburg3014, CC BY-SA 3.0. The British royal family asked the RAF not to bomb Herrenhausen Palace, which still belonged to the House of Hanover. It was hit anyway during an air raid in 1943. What remained was almost entirely cleared after the war, though someone pulled the outdoor staircase out of the debr...

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Image: Misburg3014 | CC BY-SA 3.0

Herrenhausen Gardens: Eight Rooms and Six Hundred Roses

Mon, 03 Aug 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Moskenes, CC BY-SA 4.0. Along the central axis running from the palace to the Great Fountain, eight themed gardens sit inside hedged compartments like rooms without ceilings, each one demonstrating a different stage in the history of garden design. One of them is the Low German Rose Garden, laid out dur...

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Image: Moskenes | CC BY-SA 4.0