"The garden is my best"
Charlotte Joop is 92, and not a single day passes when she does not look after the clock in her large garden in Potsdam every morning and evening.
Under the venerable larch is her favorite place. Charlotte Joop had not believed that there would be another time in her life when she would spend every day of sunshine in the shade of the protective, spreading branches - back then, during the forty years she lived in the west, in Braunschweig.
From her bank she has everything in view: the big lily pond, the bath house with wooden footbridge, the old pastures behind, further to the right her beloved tamarisk. The heather-like shrub dives in July in a pale pink sea of flowers. And, oh yes, the bed with the snow-white "aspirin" roses that Charlotte Joop created herself. She likes to look out of her chair in the living room on gray days. As today. Dachshund lady Julchen has made herself comfortable on her lap. There are tea and lemon cake with font. Homemade.
"The garden is my favorite," says Charlotte Joop. Say it again and again. She is not the type for many words. Especially not when it comes to big feelings. She is just brought up differently. Prussian. Not a day goes by without turning her round in the morning and in the evening through the one and a half hectare garden in the district of Bornstedt in Potsdam. Everything is carefully inspected, each bud, each scion lovingly appraised. Weeds are an abomination to her. It does not help that son Wolfgang and gardener Reinhard Kühn have strictly forbidden her to stoop because she fell over with the weed. "But I'll do it anyway, when I'm alone," she whispers, smiling almost girlishly. She just can not leave it. Hard to believe that this fragile, elegant woman has worked most of the time in her garden. Her long-limbed hands are so incredibly cared for.
Because of its rolling green hills, its parks and palaces, connected by a network of avenues, Potsdam is considered walkable landscape painting. This impression continues in Charlotte Joops estate. Their ancestors were gardeners from the Netherlands, were brought by the great Elector Friedrich Wilhelm I to Brandenburg. Since then, they have all earned their living with the nursery. Her father, her grandfather, her great-grandfather ... Charlotte's father Paul Ebert was a patriarch through and through. He determined what to do every day. And woe, it was not done. "There was no mercy." Daily survival regulated the rhythm of everyday life. Paul Ebert supplied the surrounding hospitals with the fruit and vegetables from his nursery. "Here was a single large kitchen garden - hothouses as far as the eye can see," says Charlotte Joop. Every plant was used. Nothing bloomed for nothing, or just for the sake of beauty. Even the pastures, through which the wind blows so painterly, had their purpose and purpose: baskets were woven from the young shoots. The invited the 19-year-old Charlotte along with the vegetables on the pickup of the family to sell them in the area.
Today it is different in the garden of Charlotte Joop. Today, the art of the former court gardeners from neighboring Sanssouci lives here, combining the useful with the beautiful. Mountain bean and lovage grow and thrive, shrubs of fragrant lemon balm, ruffle for midday salad and beetroot next to phlox, dahlia and a sea of peonies, peas and English varieties such as the pink, fragrant "Eden". She is a feast for the eyes at every stage - first as a young delicate flower, later she unfolds a morbid beauty like a prima ballerina getting old. A 40-year-old ginko brags in autumn with its colorful foliage, the huge North American pine with "the longest needles in the world" and the catalpa, a trumpet tree, in July with its white orchid-shaped flowers.
Where once the cowshed was, now the villa is in the Italian style. Wolfgang Joop gave it to his mother Charlotte on her 80th birthday.
"I feel secure in nature," says Charlotte Joop. It's been like that forever. From childhood on. "It grows and blossoms and passes away, like life." And that did not always mean well with her. It tells of war, flight and deprivation, the long, lonely waiting and anxiety about her husband Gerhard Joop, who was in captivity for years. From being alone as a mother with a young son, who saw his father for the first time at the age of eight, from moving to Brunswick in 1952 and from the Cold War, when she was only allowed to travel home once or twice a year during the holidays. "If I had sorrow, I just went to the garden." Then she dug and chewed, weeded and plucked, until her delicate hands were completely black from the heavy, warm earth. A wonderful consolation.
It rings. Two giant dogs storm into the salon, Dalmatian Gretchen and Rhodesian Ridgeback Lottchen. Behind him Wolfgang Joop. The fashion designer is tanned. In sandals, with sunglasses, trousers and shirt in lumberjack style, blue, violet and black plaid. At the weekend he looks after the right. Of course, with his mother and in the garden too.
"Hello, Charlotte, well, I see you will have a good time," he says with a grin. She shines. She is proud of her famous son. But quietly. That now the whole family is back in Potsdam, is due to him alone. Wolfgang Joop was the driving force. "My longing has always been this place," he says. He used to travel here every year in the days of the GDR, and to help his deceased aunt Ulla, she and his family home supported him wherever he could. Here was his felt home, the security of grandparents and aunts who coddled the boy wherever they could. Here was the big house where the many refugees lived, with their children he could romp around, and of course the animals. "If you had enough of it, you took a step and had the Prussian Rococo to the point," says Joop.
Now the whole family regularly gathers here: Great-granddaughter Johanna, the two granddaughters Jette and Florentine, whose mother Karin Metz-Joop and her husband Günter Metz. Everyone has their own little hideaway, and In the middle, Mother Charlotte lives in her villa. Delicate yellow, Italian, with large arched windows. The view into the garden is stunning. So many colors green. However, "one day no care, you will not forgive," says Wolfgang Joop. Just like in the family. Yes, there are a lot of similarities between all these plants.
"Man shapes the place," he says. He only realized that when he returned here, after many years in Hamburg and New York. The home touches him, the man. The artist Joop is fascinated by something else: the personal view of the world of people who have created this wonderful Potsdam landscape architecture. Beautiful spirits like himself. "I now know where I have invested my life experience, my strength and my fortune here, in order to shape it again to my will." And to give his family a home. After all, he was fortunate enough to have two daughters and a granddaughter. Unlike many of his colleagues. "I think sharing is an important gift."
On hot summer days, when the wind blows through the trees, the loungers on the lily pond are a wonderful place to relax.
In 1992, when his mother and his father, who died last year, returned to Potsdam and did not want to live at Aunt Ulla's parents' house, Wolfgang Joop had a new house built. Where the cowshed used to be, as a present for his 80th birthday mother. From then on, Charlotte Joop put the most energy into her garden. On the side of gardener Reinhard Kühn she roams him every day and forges plans. The small apple tree, for example, a Gravensteiner - was planted only last year. She is a bit worried that he will not bear fruit this year. Reinhard Kühn then says: "But Mrs. Joop, you will still be 100." Luckily she does not have to wait that long. Next year the tree will finally have apples.
"Oh, and do you know the Karl Foerster? The gardener and writer, also a famous son of Potsdam?" Charlotte Joop gets up slowly. It has already rung again. "His most beautiful book is titled, 'It's being blown through.' That's life, is not it? '
