Story
Raising awareness of the importance of trees for people and the environment, as well as the necessary transfer of knowledge from the expert to the observer, require time and space - to be experienced both mentally and in reality. With the opening of his tree museum in 2010, Enzo Enea has created a place where beauty as well as knowledge can be conveyed and thoughts can be formed in peace.
Enzo Enea is not only a landscape architect and tree specialist; he is also a preservationist. For more than 25 years, he has been rescuing trees from construction sites and other areas where they are undesired, saving them from being felled and letting them take new roots in the open-air museum at the company's headquarters. In this way, very different trees originating in our climate zone, including old, gnarled specimens marked by the environment and the weather, are given a new lease of life. On the extensive museum grounds, the beauty of these specimens is displayed as works of natural art, and their significance for man and the environment is silently understood by those who visit.
With the concept of his tree museum, Enzo Enea gave expression to his admiration and respect for trees as unique representatives of nature and life. In his open-air museum created in the industrial area of Rapperswil-Jona, he puts trees and art on equal footing and brings them into a constant dialogue, to which the visitors are also invited. This idyllic park is intended to offer time and space for contemplation. What is seen and experienced here is intended to provoke thought about how we as a society treat the environment, animals and nature, and what the consequences of unreflective expansion and consumerism are.
Created in a beautiful park of 75,000 square meters on the Obersee in Rapperswil-Jona, near Zurich, it shows a large number of trees selected from the collection of Swiss landscape architect and the collector of trees world famous Enzo Enea.
In a series of open spaces, Enea shows his appreciation for the tree, using it as object-space, creating a world that demonstrates his unique aesthetics, sustainability, history and the vital function, always with due respect.
The collection of trees is composed solely of species of local climate zone. In the museum there are over 50 trees and more than 25 species, some of which are over 100 years old and, therefore, create an aura of immortality. A further 100 trees and plants are located in a park surrounding the Tree Museum. Throughout the system Enea Landscape Architecture there are over 3000 shrubs Enea has collected over the last 20 years.
Sculptures by contemporary artists are alongside the trees, taking the old idea of combining art and nature to make them blend together. The Enzo Enea's Museum of the Tree has implemented for the first time his vision and enabled him, for the first time, to carefully combine landscape, botany, architecture, art and design.
