The contribution exemplifies how the garden as a temporary place of good living is reliterated in various ways in late eighteenth-century German literature. C.M. Wieland’s amusing short verse narrative ‚Der Vogelsang‘ adapts a medieval moral allegory for this purpose. C.A. Böttiger’s travel diary ‚Reise nach Wörlitz‘ (1797) shows the individual associative appropriation of the garden’s articulation of worldly wisdom in critical contrast to its rigid didacticization. F. Matthisson’s poem to Luise, Princess of Anhalt-Dessau, ‚Dem vierundzwanzigsten September. 1800‘ finally reads as a classicist death fantasy that translates the „Elysium“ in the ancient manner of the Wörlitz landscape garden back into the literary imagination.