Park

     Manor is settled on a slight hill and surrounded with greens from the southern and eastern side. The eastern part is a forest in which there are a cemetery and a town. From the southern side the terrain quite suddenly lowers down in terraces towards the valley of the Vistula river. Here in the middle of XIX century a landscape park was established. Designing of the park was characterized then with aiming at the total unity with the natural landscape. The park didn’t possess any visible borders. Grouped masses of greens seemed not to have any limits, they melted into the surrounding meadows and forests.
    The landscape park in Skludzewo was established in the second part of the XIX century. It was a part of properties that included: a manor, composed greens around the manor, applied gardens and a nearby farm Gniazdowo.
    Jolanta Chrostowska conducted an analysis of the age of the park’s forest stand and she confirmed the simultaneous rising of the manor and the park. She took into consideration the age of the oldest trees: maples growing in a line by the southern border of the park, maple-leaf plane-trees in front of the western side of the manor. The trees were consciously composed elements.
    There is no information about the beginning of the park in the available sources. There are no pictures of the park in the private archives, but as a result of intensive research, we found pictures of the palace and the surrounding forest stand from about 1890-1905. First detailed cartographic materials on which there is the whole manor terrain date back to 1909. From the north the border of the park was a way being an extension to the driveway, from the west – a way descending to the foot of the slope, from the south – a way to Torun, and from the east – forested terrain with some trails of a medieval town.
    The localisation of the manor and park created fantastic conditions for designing a garden. These elements are most of all – an accurate set-out, diverse shape of the terrain, neighbourhood of the natural forestation and attractive, far perspectives. Thanks to such elements one could design a park according to all rules of the gardening art of those times. Jolanta Chrostowska writes: The driveway to the terrain of settlement led form the west, from the way from Dabrowa Chelminska and it finished at the front of the manor settled by the edge of the Vistula pravalley’s slope. He main interior of the park was composed from the southern side of the manor. A vast glade, touched from the east and the west with thick forest stand massifs, reached down to the whole deepness of the slope. From the south it was closed by a line of maples being at the same time sidings of the way to Torun. It should be marked that neither trees nor the way blinded the far perspectives – just the opposite – they enriched the landscape of the surroundings included into the composition of the park. The author adds that the main view axis leading from the manor ran through the biggest glade far away to the horizon. In front of the manor, from the inside of the glade, other view pivots spread in a ray manner in the southern direction. The pivots had in their range vast plans with visible picturesque meadows, chessboard of fields, ways with line of trees along them and groups of forestations between the fields.
    This is the way Joanna Chrostowska describes the park from the northern edge in the north-eastern direction where the landscape could be seen – a flat plain with meadows, fields, clusters of natural forestation. From here exactly went the way being a continuation of the driveway. At the western side of the manor the way divided into the form of a “goose foot”. One branch led along the northern border, the second one crossed the park in the south-eastern direction and the third one went almost perpendicularly down the slope. All connections were connected with the maple alley by the southern border of the park. The middle division led to a family cemetery and finished in the eastern corner, in the place where there was once a medieval knight’s town. One may assume that the localisation of the cemetery was predicted at the very moment of establishing the park. As one can say from the only preserved inscription, a burial took place there as early as in 1873, so eight years after taking the property over by Brauer. The eastern and western part of the park was the slope that in these directions went down more gently than from the southern side. The arrangement of the forestation created a row of greater and smaller freely shaped park interiors. Numerous streams falling down to a syncline caving by its south-western border started in the western edge of the park. They joined with thick net of water - course cutting in different directions the bottom of the pravalley of Vistula . On northern-east the park " was strengthened” by a naturally forested area. There, in a thick complex of greens is hidden the oldest tree in Skludzewo - growing on an ornate slope 400-year-old oak called the Countess' Oak and recognised as a monument of nature.
     In XIX century it was fashionable to enrich the native vegetable material with foreign species, attractive in habit, foliage or other distinctive features. Such trees were usually planted in landscape parks, individually on spacious glades, taking care about proper conditions of their exposition. In the Skludzewian park these fancies were realised in front of the western top of the manor. The main accent of the glade was a solitary maple-leaf plane-tree, today a monumental specimen with a beautiful symmetrical crown and characteristic original bark. The second big plane-tree is near the entrance road to the palace. Studying the sources we find out that the elements of the primal composition of foundation changed with changes of the hosts of the object. The manor fulfilled the function of a family residence, at least to the end of XIX century. In 1907, after breaking up, the owner of t he ground with the manor and the park, became the Prussian State, and the Settlement Committee for Western Prussias and The Poznanian in Poznan administered the ground.
    After World War II the palace and park complex served as a shop, library, school, private flats. In result of use of the manor and the park by so many different users the way of using the closest surroundings changed. The most essential fragments of the park composition were altered with the current users' needs. The terrain was divided with fences made of steel net, vegetable gardens were created for the inhabitants of the manor, the closest glade from south-eastern side served as a school field. These terrains were exploited particularly intensely and what goes after it - destroyed. The garden pavilion was changed into toilets. The rest of the park was used and devastated to a smaller degree. However because of the lack of any nurturing the primal composition changed.
    The uncontrolled growth of self-seeds caused, that changed, and in particular - decreased the outlines of the park interiors and less readable became the main view axises. The records since 1989 show that the Foundation becoming the only host of the whole place took up an intensive reconstruction of the park in the Landscape Programme.
     Thanks to good soils, profitable water conditions and suitable exhibition, the vegetation in the park is exceptionally luxuriant, though the variability of species is not great. On the terrain of the park till 1990 there were twenty trees' species and ten shrubs' species found. As for coniferous three species were found: common spruce, European larch and western thuja, which gives only 1,5 % of the whole afforestation. The natural growth is build mainly by: common maple, European ash and common hornbeam. It in the oldest trees' group, over 120-year-old, the most common were the common maples Two trees were recognized as monuments of nature: leaf stalk oak - so called " Countess' oak" with a circuit of 411 cm, with the number 103, protected since 1975, estimated as 400 years old; maple –leaf plane-tree - circuit 270 cm, number 310, age 140 years . Several different specimens - maples, ash and sessile oak reached also the sizes required for acknowledgement them as monumental trees.
    All green terrains (park, floral gardens, amphitheatre over water, roads and entrance sidings to the palace) are available for guests - artists, children, youth and adults, tourists and inhabitants of Skludzewo.