Hanover's great green oasis.

Management of the Herrenhausen Gardens relies on two battery-powered 1160 eHoftracs for the park’s own gardening operation.

At the end of the 17th century, the House of Guelph's Elector of Hanover had a summer residence built at the gates of the city of Hanover and thus Herrenhausen became a European cultural attraction. The baroque gardens, covering some 50 hectares, remain virtually unchanged and are testament to their time. The Herrenhausen Gardens have gradually been extended and today their 100 hectares combine a trilogy of styles in garden design to form a unique historical ensemble. In the newly built, reconstructed palace, a museum provides insights into Herrenhausen’s design and development and period of origin. The Großer Garten never fails to impress visitors with its baroque ornamentation and magnificent fountains and water features. The Berggarten is where many botanical treasures can be found, as well as glasshouses full of glorious orchids and other exotic plants. The garden began its life on the slope of an ice age sand dune and was gradually transformed from a vegetable garden to a botanical garden with an unusual biodiversity. 120,000 types of plant alone from around the world are here to be admired. Together with the Großer Garten, the Georgengarten and the Welfengarten, it forms part of the Herrenhausen Gardens, visited by some 500,000 people each year, and as such, also ranks as one of the many cultural events visited.

The two battery-powered “Weidemanns” come into play here, with their noise-free and emission-free operation supporting the continuous and extensive gardening done by around 100 employees. The machines are used in places such as the cactus house, the orchid house, various other hothouses and of course in the vast outdoor areas. Equipped with various buckets, a pallet fork and a pot grip for moving palms, they do much of the necessary everyday and seasonal heavy work and transportation. With their TÜV road circulation approval, they can also move palms from where they are kept during the winter to locations in urban areas.

So, for Alexander Willers, the Weidemanns made light work of replacing the cactus substrate in the cactus house: “We use the eHoftracs every day, with different drivers for a variety of tasks. They are popular with everyone, because working with them means low levels of noise and no emissions and driving them to the various houses is effortless. Our employees and visitors to the gardens all benefit because the machines do not bother them. We plug them in to charge overnight and the next morning they are ready for us to start work again.” “These machines are ideal for park operation - they have the performance that's needed for the day-to-day heavy work and their environmentally-friendly battery power offers a whole host of benefits to urban gardening. So, it is not surprising that the size of the Herrenhausen Gardens and the heavy workload meant that we were asked to supply two machines at the same time,” added Heino Lampe from Lampe Land- und Gartentechnik in Isernhagen.