‘Grüneburgpark is the big, popular landscape park with meadows and a Korean garden. Bethmannpark is the small, intimate historic garden known especially for its Chinese garden’ - Bettina Klara Bugglecertified Frankfurt city guide
Pictures by Isabela Pacini, David Vasicek, Christoph Partsch and Florian Trykowski
First impressions of a city are usually its truest. Mine of Frankfurt was of a skyline bristling with glass towers, an airport in perpetual motion, and a pulse set by trading floors. All true. But scratch beneath the financial veneer, and Frankfurt reveals itself as something else entirely: a city quietly in love with its own greenery.
I was in town on a tour organised by the GNTB, curious to see the ‘Green Frankfurt’ everyone talked about but few outsiders knew. What I found stopped me in my tracks - nearly half the city’s area is covered by parks, gardens, forests and fields, the legacy of a decade-old civic policy to plant trees along every street, reclaim asphalt for pocket parks, and protect the old growth that remains.
This love of gardens is no recent fad. Many of Frankfurt’s grandest green spaces began as private estates, thrown open to the public - or sold to the city - from the early 19th century onward. That is why so many of them still carry the surnames of Frankfurt’s old dynasties: Holzhausen, Bethmann, Brentano, Rothschild.
Guiding me along with media professionals pedalling through the city by velotaxi - was Bettina Klara Buggle, a certified Frankfurt city guide with an unusual résumé. Trained as an economist, she spent much of her career consulting for the financial industry before switching tracks entirely. “Since 2004 I have been giving lectures and readings about Frankfurt's history,” she told me - first on a voluntary basis in libraries and church halls, before earning her formal guide certification in 2019.
Her tours now range across banking lore, the old city walls, and the 1848 Paulskirche revolution - but that afternoon, it was Frankfurt’s gardens taking centre stage.
As we set off toward Grüneburgpark, near Goethe University’s Westend campus, Bettina promised a tour steeped in the city’s lesser-known lore. The park itself sprawls across roughly 70 acres, one of Frankfurt’s largest and best-loved - wide meadows, century-old trees, playgrounds and rose beds marking the site of a long-vanished palace.
“With the city before your eyes and images in your mind, I’ll guide you through Frankfurt with many beautiful, funny, sometimes sad, but always exciting stories,” she adds.
From there we went to Bethmannpark, a tighter, more intimate affair at just 7.7 acres, its outdoor chess tables and old camellia house exuding a quieter, old-world charm. “Grüneburgpark is the big, popular landscape park with meadows and a Korean garden,” Bettina explained. “Bethmannpark is the small, intimate historic garden known especially for its Chinese garden. Both have ties to the Bethmann banking family.”
That Chinese garden - the ‘Garden of Heavenly Peace,’ laid out in 1989 - was the day’s revelation: a zig-zag bridge, a dragon-guarded gate, a lotus pond and the ‘Pavilion of the Pure Heart’, rebuilt by hand after fire gutted it in 2017. Its calligraphy inscription, loosely translated, speaks of finding in silence the strength to think anew - fitting counsel in a city that rarely stops moving.
We also wandered the grounds of the Holzhausenschlösschen, a moated Baroque summer house whose 200-year-old trees Bettina pointed out with visible pride, and heard the story behind Frankfurt’s beloved marzipan sweet, the Bethmännchen - a treat that, in its missing fourth almond, quietly mourns a family’s lost son.
We ended, fittingly, at a Wasserhäuschen - one of Frankfurt’s ubiquitous kiosk-cafés – lemon drink in hand, feeling, for one afternoon at least, like true Frankfurters ourselves.
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