N.Z. Alpine and Rock Garden Society

Hutt News, Volume 12, Issue 39, 22 March 1939, Page 7

N.Z. Alpine and Rock Garden Society

- $ MONTHLY LETTER (By-Mr. T. W. AUvood, Director.) Mantle of Flowers on the Mountainous Schlossberg. ; J Travellers who seek the finest parks and gardens to enjoy during their Continental journeyings - will find a peak rising out of the centre of the capital city- of Graz, in'Styria, Southern Austria, a century-old park of a sort than can be seen nowhere. outside of Europe. Most of this ' unique park is a great rock garden built on precipitous rocky slopes jUst below the small mountain's summit. : The. city below, with its 150,000 inhabitants, including' university and conversatory students, augmented by music lovers who go there for the excellent Opera, was known as a Roman town as far back as 88i'A.D. About two centuries later, the castle was first built. amid the white poppies and bright blue gentians which bloomed around the summit. When Kaiser Friedrich 111 of AusI tria, in the early 14th century, made I the castle into a strong "fortress,, little could he have dreamed that less than 600 years later (600 years is so short a time in a land of ancient castles) the statue to stand on the grounds' of his powerful fortress would be, not of . himself, Frederick the Fair, as Emperor, but of one Freiherr von Welden, who conceived the .idea of creating a great public park on the site of the ruined castle. Generations now have passed' since the stronghold was last occupied by the overlords of the territory. By the 16th century it had become the government seat of the Hapsburgs, already known as an ancient Styrian family of great power. At the end of the 18th century (1797), Napoleon enter/ Graz, and made the town his headquarters for 12 years; •In 1809 the French vainly besieged the hill-top castle, almost completely destroying it. To-day it is but a relic—but an imposing one—of the feudal past. In the days when the castle was being used, there was no inclined railway, to carry its residents up from the town 700 feet below. A tortuous road no doubt wound for several miles up the small mountain, just as the private service road for motors frinds to-day. The public to-day reach the top in a few minutes' ride on the inclined railway; or people may climb by easy stages the long flight of steps which nearly parallels the "tracks. From the top one may look down to the River Mur on the west, over splendid trees and gardens towards the east, and on all sides of the hill to the busy town which surrounds it below. Most of the top—the grounds surrounding the castle, also the slopes as far down as people can comfortably walk —is now a public park, with a rock garden planted as one of its features. Moreover, this is a genuine rock garden; not a slope in which round stones have been embedded at regular intervals, with common garden flowers growing between them, but a garden planted in the crevices of rocks which must have been standing there for aeons. Plants which have always grown naturally on this mountain have been encouraged by gardeners' care, and other native wild flowers of the region have been brought in. Under the expert hands of Herr Hauszer, director of the Schlossberg gardens, the little wild white poppies, familiar to all who have traversed the mountain sides of this region, choice campanulas and gentians, masses of > white sedum, native