[2] Johann Bernhard Ferdinand Jühlke, the third of his parents' three recorded sons together, was born on 1 September 1815 and baptised 16 days later, at Barth (Pomerania), in the extreme north of what would become Germany.
The young course director, Professor Christian Friedrich Hornschuch, was keen to combine academic and botanical instruction with the aesthetic and artistic aspects of horticulture, both in his approach to teaching and in the way he had the gardens arranged.
[2] Keen to master the intellectual context of his chosen speciality, his self-structured programme of complementary education included private tutoring in Botanic sciences, Physics, Maths and Quantitative Measurement.
[2][6] Recommended by Professor Hornschuch, in 1834 Jühlke was offered and accepted the position of "Academic Gardener" at the Royal Agricultural Academy Eldena.
He was thereby placed in charge of a prestigious teaching and research academy, newly established by the university on the site of a former monastery (which had fallen into ruin since dissolution in 1535).
By this time Jühlke was also sharing his expertise in horticulture with numerous contributions to specialist journals, through engagement in agricultural associations and participation in exhibitions.
As a young man Bismarck evidently believed that his future would involve inheriting and then improving and managing the extensive family agricultural estates on which he had grown up.
The men's surviving correspondence indicates that Bismarck would always retain a lively interest in horticultural matters, and that he would frequently seek advice on them from his former teacher at the Eldena Academy.
He resigned this government post four years later, also in 1858 turning down the offer of a job as Director of the vast Imperial Botanical Gardens in Tiflis.
)[2] Instead he moved south within Germany, taking over the C. Appelius commercial nursery business in the centrally located Andreasvorstadt quarter of Erfurt which, like his home region, had become part of Prussia in 1815.
[13] Because of the huge international success of the exhibition, the Ministry for Agriculture conferred on Franz Carl Heinemann the title "Royal Prussian Director of Horticulture" ("Königlich Preußischer Gartenbaudirektor") later the same year.
One generally unremarked aspect of the changes was the way that Horticulture developed, by the 1860s no longer a mere footnote to Agriculture, but an important free-standing component in a modern rapidly expanding national economy.
[2] He also restructured the nearby Alt-Geltow Royal Arboreal College to make it more responsive to market requirements, during a period in which intellectuals and other opinion formers were rediscovering a German woodland heritage – part real: part imagined – possibly in response to accelerating industrialisation and urbanisation.
Examples include the garden-park surrounding the villa in Eisenach of his friend, the Mecklenburg popular novelist and poet Fritz Reuter.
[16] In Stralsund, the regional capital nearby, he was instrumental in implementing a long-standing ambition of many city-folk by constructing an impressive network of public parks and landscaped walkways.
The development was made possible by the decommissioning, for serious defensive purposes, of the city's massive ramparts which had been constructed and then progressively extended through the centuries during which Stralsund was much fought over (most recently) between Poland, Pomerania, Brandenburg-Prussia, Sweden, France and others.
Widely respected by fellow horticulturalists and scholars, he became a frequent presence at national and international horticulture festivals and garden exhibitions, judging and moderating the competitions.