Picture: Yaser Amachi
On the south side of the Oberhaus, there is a rectangular lawn bordered by a band of flowerbeds. The terrain around it slopes down towards the fields, but the garden runs at ground level to the Oberhaus and is guarded by a wall to the south.
We don’t know exactly what the garden looked like when it was built. The oldest depiction of it is on a water supply plan from around 1800. On this plan, the garden is sketched as an arrangement of rectangular areas separated by garden paths. Family portraits from the 1930s suggest a similar structure. On these photographs, you can see vegetables and berries grow between the gravelled garden paths. A garden plan by Stefan’s grandmother Hedwig Bühler-Boller from 1948 confirms that still after the war, the garden was mainly used for planting food.
It was only after Stefan’s parents Albert and Rosmarie Bühler took over the farm that the garden was redesigned. The garden hut on the south end was torn down. A sandbox for the children took its place. The door of the garden hut was integrated into the new covered seating area. A little while ago, the windows have also been added to the seating area as part of the decoration (we wrote about it in this blog post). The garden area was brought into its current form, with a lawn in the middle and flowerbeds all around. The beds are filled with roses, tulips, lilies, peonies, hydrangeas, poppies, primroses, snowdrops, daffodils, daisies and numerous other plants, of which we often don’t even know the names.
Recently, the garden has regained some of its old form. We found the Art Nouveau garden furniture that once stood here in the pigeonry and decided to reuse it. We replaced missing and defective parts, sanded everything down and repainted it. Now the old chairs and benches stand on the terrace in front of the covered seating area, and the guests of the Bed & Breakfast sit on them when they have breakfast outside in fine weather.