New Garden

The New Garden stretches across 102 hectares between the Heiliger See and the Jungfernsee on the northern edge of Potsdam. Frederick William II began laying it out in 1787, deliberately as a sentimental English landscape park in contrast to his uncle's strict Sanssouci. Garden designer Johann August Eyserbeck and later Peter Joseph Lenne shaped a carefully composed sequence of water, meadows and tree clumps with view axes reaching across the lake to Berlin-Wannsee. The park contains the Marble Palace on the shore, the Dutch-style Red Houses at the entrance, and Cecilienhof Palace, where the Potsdam Conference met in 1945. The whole garden is part of the UNESCO World Heritage Palaces and Parks of Potsdam and Berlin.