Cultivating, Designing, and Teaching: Jewish Women in Modern Viennese Garden Architecture

Abstract

Most of the very few women working in garden architecture in Vienna in the 1920s and 1930s came from liberal bourgeois Jewish families. Yella Hertzka founded the first advanced horticultural school for women within the Austro-Hungarian Monarchy in 1913. About 10 years later, Grete Salzer, a graduate from Hertzka's school, and Dr Paula Fürth, a plant physiologist, established their own businesses in the same Viennese upper-class district as Yella Hertzka, each consisting of a perennial nursery, a garden architecture studio and a horticultural school. Hanny Strauß ran a nursery in her radically modern house, designed by Josef Frank in 1914, and Helene Wolf, another graduate from Hertzka's school, operated a nursery and a garden architecture practice near Vienna. All four garden architects created modern gardens in and around Vienna and cooperated with designers and architects from the Austrian Werkbund. Their violent expulsion in 1938–39 left a significant gap in Austrian garden architecture in the early twentieth century.