The man who designed the Mirabell Gardens. Franz Anton Danreiter created the definitive baroque layout around 1730 under Archbishop Firmian, transforming an earlier garden into one of the finest baroque garden compositions in the German-speaking world: the symmetrical parterre, the geometric hedging, the rose garden, and the famous Zwerglgarten (Dwarf Garden) with its collection of carved stone dwarf figures.
The Mirabell Gardens that visitors photograph today, and that appear in The Sound of Music, are substantially his creation.
Danreiter also produced a series of landscape engravings of Salzburg and its surroundings, some of the most important documentary records of the city's 18th-century appearance. He was both the garden's architect and its visual chronicler.
