In the middle of December we went on countrywide lockdown again here in Germany. Back to homeschooling, sourdough and Zoom. We are grateful to be here.

Happily we spent some of the time planting trees, thanks to you.

Herr Anschütz’s team spent two weeks here in December, digging holes, placing and planting root balls, staking and wrapping trunks against deer, then mulching around the base. Fifty young trees now join the 50 or so we had planted the year we completed construction.

Because our property had been a GDR small industrial pig farm, and likely pasture land before that, we had no large trees besides the poplars along the western border that had been planted as windbreak during the GDR time.

The German Gartenkünstler (garden artist) Peter Joseph Lenné (1789–1866), who created Berlin’s Tiergarten and Landwehrkanal, as well as the magnificent parks of Sans Souci in Potsdam, emphasized the use of Sichtachsen (visual axes) in landscape design in order to draw the vision along specific lines into the distance.

Incredibly and to our eternal delight a Lenné Park graces our village. Centuries old oaks, chestnuts and linden trees grow there.

The 50 new trees on our humble former pig farm have transformed the landscape, though they are bare of leaves and their trunks are less than a child’s fist in diameter. We now have a garden — distinct from the fields beyond.