ABSTRACT
The first significant garden theory in Germany among those philosophers influenced by Kant was the one produced by Karl Heinrich Heydenreich, professor of philosophy at Leipzig University from 1789 to 1798. The challenge of a garden semiotics, then, arises not from how to motivate its signs, but from a problem proceeding in the opposite direction: how to enable its elements to approximate the signifying capacity of arbitrary signs. In its self-contained movement, it mimics the just completed experience of strolling through the garden and in this sense can be understood not only as a spatially composite picture but also as a temporal recapitulation. Nevertheless, the succession of scenes, by offering numerous strolling possibilities and re-using elements in multiple configurations, presents Heydenreich with a set of difficulties he does not adequately answer.
