Raising awareness of the importance of trees for humans and the environment takes time and space.
It requires both mental and real-life experiences, as well as knowledge transfer from experts to observers.

Enzo Enea has created a place where beauty and knowledge are conveyed, and thoughts can take shape in peace. His Tree Museum opened in 2010.
This is also the headquarters of his landscape architecture company.

Enzo Enea is a landscape architect and tree specialist, as well as a conservationist.
Since the 1990s, he has been rescuing trees from construction sites, private gardens, or parks, saving them from being cut down and allowing them to take root in the Tree Museum.
In this way, a variety of trees are given a new lease on life, including old, gnarled specimens marked by their surroundings and weather.
In the expansive museum grounds, they express their unique beauty as natural artworks and silently, yet powerfully, convey their importance for humans and the environment.

Enzo Enea is convinced that the aesthetics and individual beauty of gardens and parks, as well as of wild, untouched nature, are immediately accessible to us at first glance.

Life, nature – everything is a cycle.
A cycle like the oval of the Panathinaiko Stadium’s Olympic track.
Built in 1896 for the first modern Olympic Games on the foundations of the ancient site, the Olympic ideal of competing in fair sporting events to promote understanding between peoples and cultures is a deeply humanistic vision.
For Enzo Enea, it represents one of the most inspiring ideals of modern times.
And so, his Tree Museum takes its form and layout from the Olympic model.

While the ancient Olympic running event “Diaulos” focused on physical competition over 400 meters, our equally long tour aims to provide peace and space for contemplation.
It opens up opportunities for inner dialogue and can stimulate reflection on our relationship with nature and the environment.

In the Tree Museum, in addition to the Olympic track, other circles are closed – both real and metaphorical.
A first clue is hinted at on the east side of the site. Here, the tour passes by a carefully arranged storage area of large sandstone pots and fountains, displayed openly on multiple levels.
Representing different styles and executions, they symbolize the craftsmanship of various decades.
These works, commissioned over three generations – by Enzo Enea’s grandfather, father, and himself – are emblematic of the tradition and ongoing history of the company.

In 2010, Enzo Enea signed a lease agreement with the Mariazell Wurmsbach convent for a duration of 99 years for 7.5 hectares of land.
Sufficient space to design and implement the Tree Museum according to his ideas.

The first task was to cultivate the marshy farmland.
This was achieved by planting 38 swamp cypresses, each of which can extract up to 800 liters of water from the soil daily.
The cypresses then release the extracted water back to the surrounding plants through their leaves.
This creates a pleasant microclimate throughout the area.
In addition to this practical benefit, the swamp cypresses form a beautiful avenue that guides visitors to the entrance of the Tree Museum.
Within our Tree Museum, yew hedges serve as directional markers.
Through modern pruning techniques, they have acquired soft, organic shapes; they frame the tour and visually guide visitors through the facility.
The Celts and Romans already knew about the effects of yew trees not only as poison but also as a remedy.
They buried their dead under yew trees and placed yew branches as grave offerings.
The branches were meant to facilitate the transition into the afterlife and provide protection against demons, spirits, and misfortune.

Today, yew trees are used in chemotherapy; the substance Paclitaxel or Taxol found in their bark inhibits cell division and can therefore halt or even stop the progression of cancer.
Thus, yew trees serve today as they did in ancient times as a transitional plant between life and death.

With his Tree Museum, Enzo Enea expressed his admiration and respect for trees – they are unique representatives of nature and life.

In his Tree Museum created in the midst of an industrial area, Enea showcases trees and art on an equal footing.
Furthermore, he brings them into a constant dialogue to which you as visitors are also invited.

By incorporating works of internationally renowned artists into the Tree Museum, Enea demonstrates that architecture, art, and design ideally not only merge with nature but often originate from it in form and diversity.

Enea is not concerned with staged perfection, but rather with the unique and natural.
The imposing limestone walls against which he presents the rescued trees are – like the trees themselves – remnants, leftovers.
A kind of quantité négligeable: insignificant remains that are left over when blocks are processed in the venerable Veronese quarries for the production of limestone pots.
There, where once the material for the construction of Andrea Palladio’s Renaissance villas was hewn from the rock.

Set together to form large stone walls, these remaining blocks pile up into a phalanx, a protection that simultaneously serves as a stage and frame for trees and art.