The inconstant gardener

In the autumn of 1826, Prince Hermann Ludwig Heinrich von Pückler-Muskau came ashore in London after a long and gruelling voyage from Rotterdam.

In the autumn of 1826, Prince Hermann Ludwig Heinrich von Pückler-Muskau came ashore in London after a long and gruelling voyage from Rotterdam. A whiskery Prussian princeling with a heavily indebted estate and a passion for landscape gardening, Pückler had come to England determined to find a wife.

This was not a romantic project, however. English women were celebrated on the continent not only for their beauty — the perpetual damp was said to do wonders for their skin — but for their prosperity. Every year the arrival of the Season brought with it, like a plague of flying ants, a host of obscurely gazetted European noblemen in search of fat dowries.

Pückler was one of them. He came into his inheritance after a somewhat rackety youth — a bundle survives among his personal papers marked ‘Drafts of old love letters to be re-used as appropriate’ — and he married Lucie Countess Pappenheim, a stout widow nine years his senior.

The relationship between Pückler and Lucie is the really interesting one. There doesn’t seem to have been much in the way of sexual feeling between them. Pückler preferred slender teenage girls, as he demonstrated by seducing her 17-year-old ward Helmina shortly after they married. But they were devoted to one another. He called Lucie Schnucke, meaning ‘lambkin’, and she called him Lou, possibly from loup for ‘wolf’ or filou for ‘rascal’. They were also devoted to his family estate, Muskau. Pückler dreamed of landscaping its grounds, but was in danger of losing the whole estate if he couldn’t clear the debts.

The idea seems to have come from Lucie: they’d get a divorce, Pückler would go to England and marry a docile heiress, and once his new bride was safely back in Muskau and the money banked, Lucie would rejoin the household.