Discover Pliezhausen: Orchard Meadows and Local History
Accommodation in Pliezhausen
Orchard meadows, heritage fruit garden and local history
Pliezhausen reveals itself through its orchard meadows and traces of everyday life in the community. Those looking to combine nature and culture on a trip will find a range of points of interest here: a heritage fruit garden with old apple and pear varieties, a village museum in a former farmhouse and a striking relief of Mercury at St Martin’s Church. These experiences offer different focal points for planning your trip without reducing nature and local history to a single theme.
Heritage fruit varieties and landscape
The heritage fruit garden at the Pliezhausen Fruit Variety Museum preserves mainly old apple and pear varieties that also grow in the region. The entire collection of trees belonging to the Fruit Variety Museum, including its extension, comprises 257 trees. Two display boards provide information about the varieties, and the older trees have name plaques. The garden therefore highlights both the diversity of the trees and their names. If you are interested in growing and varieties of apples and pears, you can make the heritage fruit garden a focus of your stay.
Orchard meadows also strongly shape the landscape around Pliezhausen. They provide valuable habitats for many animal and plant species and serve as a local recreation area for residents. The Reichenbach Circuit follows a varied route through woodland and meadows in the southeastern part of the Schönbuch near Pliezhausen. Together with Pliezhausen’s membership in Schönbuch Nature Park, this offers several ways to enjoy nature: orchard meadows are part of the landscape, while the circuit takes in woodland and meadows. If nature experiences are your main priority when choosing a holiday apartment, you can consider these different themes when making your decision.
Village history and a Roman god
In the village centre, the “Ahnenhaus” village museum is located at Entenhof 17. It is housed in a former farmhouse dating from 1570. The permanent exhibition brings together examples of everyday life and crafts from the past: a former village shop from the 1940s, a one-room school, the rare craft of chimney building, and a shoemaker’s workshop and a tailor’s workshop. The different exhibits focus on the ways people lived and worked in the past. You can also visit a bakehouse and a farmhouse garden on the grounds.
Another special discovery is the relief of Mercury at St Martin’s Church. The 1.30-metre-high relief is embedded horizontally in the wall and depicts Mercury with a winged hat, herald’s staff and money bag. Locally, it is known as the “little Pliezhausen devil”. The name is thought to have arisen because the hat’s wings were mistaken for horns in the 16th century. This explanation remains speculative; the combination of the depiction and its traditional name is what makes the relief a distinct topic in local history.
Complementing the original relief, the VEX LEG VIII AVG interest group built a replica of a small temple to Mercury in the Zimmermann family’s garden. It stands at Rosenstraße 10 and is open to the public. The replica is intended to show what such a small temple to Mercury might have looked like. This presents two different ways of exploring the theme of Mercury: the relief at St Martin’s Church and the vivid reconstruction in the garden. When looking for a holiday apartment, you can consider whether you would like to focus your stay more on the orchard meadows and nature or on discoveries like these in local cultural history.
If you would like to discover more places, you can also visit the pages for Gomadingen, Riederich, Hayingen, Lichtenstein, Reutlingen, Hohenstein, Münsingen and Eningen unter Achalm.
Return to the main travel overview: Reutlingen.
