Gardens of the Hesperides

About this place

Behind the houses of Johannisstrasse, in the St Johannis district just outside the old walls, hide a set of small baroque gardens named after the daughters of Hesperus, the guardians of the golden fruit in Greek myth. The golden fruit here was citrus. In the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries wealthy Nuremberg merchants grew lemons and bitter oranges in their private plots — an expensive vanity in a climate that freezes hard and demanded heated houses to keep the tubs alive over winter. The proof of it is a book rather than a garden. In seventeen hundred and eight the merchant Johann Christoph Volkamer published his Nuremberg Hesperides, the first German monograph on citrus, filled with fine copperplate engravings that set each fruit against a real view of a city garden or building. The result is as much a picture record of Nuremberg at the start of the eighteenth century as it is a manual for growers. What you walk through today is not preserved original but a reconstruction begun in the early nineteen-eighties and guided by those plates. A visit is short and costs nothing: clipped box parterres, sandstone statues, water basins, a small fountain, and potted citrus wheeled outdoors in summer and back under cover in winter. There are only four linked plots, walkable in half an hour, and they are at their best between May and September when the trees are out and the beds are in flower. In winter little is left but the trimmed hedging.