The Vortex Garden

Hidden in the heart of Darmstadt, the Vortex Garden was originally built in 1921 by the architect, Jan Hubert Pinand. A major theme of the Vortex Garden is sacred geometry, which ascribes symbolic meaning to geometric shapes such as seen in crop circles. 

The Vortex Garden, which is inspired by crop circles and the Fibonacci sequence, features complex designs and shapes throughout the grounds. More than one hundred egg-shaped stepping stones surround the house, crop circle pentagrams and pictographs dot the garden, while cerebral architecture—such as the copper Flowform—features a vortex.

It’s said the Vortex Garden is a pantheistic permaculture garden. Pantheistic refers to the belief that there is no distinction between reality and divinity, and that all things hold an element of God in them. Permaculture is a style of agricultural design focused on mirroring patterns observed in nature. 

The Vortex Garden, encapsulates all these ideas, while also paying homage to the helix-shaped form of DNA—or vortex—that is the basis of all life. 

Today, the Vortex Garden is the private property of Darmstadt resident Henry Nold, but remains open to the public for visits.