The Garden That Left No Trace: Virtual Reconstruction at the Evidential Minimum — a Conjectural Renaissance Kitchen Garden for Burg Schönebeck

Abstract

Gardens are the most perishable class of built heritage. A demolished building leaves foundations, fragments, andusually documents; a garden leaves soil. When the garden in question was a working kitchen garden at a minorWestphalian castle — never painted, never engraved, never described — the reconstructor faces the discipline'slimiting case: a place for which the direct evidence is a single earthwork, and everything else must be argued intoexistence. This article reports and then re-theorises such a reconstruction: a conjectural Renaissance-period vegetable garden for the moated north-western "granary island" at Burg Schönebeck (Nottuln, North Rhine-Westphalia), modelled by the author as a master's thesis at Hochschule Anhalt. The article's contribution is not the model but the method made explicit. The thesis's intuitive sequence —research, deduction, design — is restated as a formal inferential pipeline in which four classes of evidence (theanchoring trace, the documentary frame, a typological corpus of comparanda, and period practice) pass through named warrants to produce the model's elements. Every element of the reconstruction — bridge, gate, lion-crowned pedestals, stone enclosure, pergola armature, central altar, planting programme, and a fourteen-station Via Crucis — is then entered into an Evidence–Inference Ledger that classifies its warrant on a four-grade scalefrom anchored to conjectural and states, for each, what it would take to be wrong. The ledger operationalises, for a single small model, the transparency that the London Charter and the Seville Principles demand of computer-based visualisation in general. The claim advanced is deliberately austere. The model does not show what the garden was; no model of this sitecould. It shows what a garden here could defensibly have been — a hypothesis rendered visible, carrying itsreasoning on its surface, and open at every joint to the archaeology that could one day test it. The wager of thearticle is that this austerity is not a weakness of virtual reconstruction but its highest use: where matter is silent,the model is the argument.