The gardens of the Goethe era, with their idyllic groves, antiquizing and Gothic ruin architectures, exotic South Sea huts, and mysterious cave passages, allowed nature-loving, sensitive audiences to dream of a truly recoverable Golden Age while wandering through them. However, famous German and European landscape gardens in Weimar, Wörlitz, Potsdam, Schwetzingen, Stowe, or Wilanów were always consciously staged representations of the landscape by their owners, designed as dynastic-genealogical, hermetically-mystical, and political memorial sites. The political character of the emergence of the early "English" garden in Europe is significantly shaped by attempts to plausibly locate the supposedly ancient heritage of noble families within the landscape, in terms of iconography, semantics, aesthetics, and even botany.