Waldpark

The peculiarity of this park in the city district of Blasewitz is to be seen above all in its history. Ever since the Middle Ages, natural pine woods have been documented on the poor soils of the gravel terraces along the left banks of the Elbe between today's Johannstadt and Zschachwitz. One of these woods was the so-called »Blasewitzer Tännicht«. It is thanks to the initiative of Arthur Willibald von Königsheim, a high-ranking Saxon ministry official, who had lived in the still relatively undeveloped Blasewitz area since 1863, that large areas of the »Tännicht« were incorporated into the Waldpark and thus protected from the increasingly prevalent land speculation of the time.

Von Königsheim's idea was to establish a shareholder corporation, the so-called »Waldpark-Gesellschaft«, to acquire substantial areas of the local land, to transform the central part into a park, and to divide the peripheral sections as building land for a villa colony reflecting the highest cultural ideals of the time. The sales of the building land financed the planning of the park, for which the services of court gardener Hermann Sigismund Neumann, the designer of the Albrechtsberg Palace gardens, were secured.

The plans for the Waldpark were presented to the public in 1868. After some initial difficulties, the building sites were all sold by 1872, and Neumann's landscaping plans were realised. A year later, the capital of the »Waldpark-Gesellschaft«, together with the park itself, was written over to the community of Blasewitz in the form of a foundation.