The history of the gardens around Ludwigsburg Palace is marked by diverse planning and realization, by decay and reconstruction. The gardens also always reflected styles and the prevailing taste at any given time.
The palace founder, Duke Eberhard Ludwig, had a complex, ground-level parterre garden (French for "at ground level") laid out to the south of the palace in the baroque style. Its counterpart, a terraced garden in the north, was never finished. During the years 1715-33 this garden was gradually altered to the French style in the course of palace additions.
Like all baroque gardens, the Ludwigsburg garden was symmetrically laid out with an axial reference to the Palace. Court society used the garden as a banquet hall in the open. In addition, it also served for taking strolls and representation purposes.
Duke Friedrich II, the later King Friedrich, wanted to use Ludwigsburg Palace as a summer palace and had the meanwhile neglected gardens completely laid out and changed after 1798. In front of the south side of the Palace an unpretentious parterre with a canal was created. In the north and east English landscape gardens were planted in accordance with the taste of the age. These were laid out differently, i.e. southern-cheerful, northern-romantic and exotic.
King Wilhelm I von Württemberg showed little interest in the summer residence. As a result, parts of the gardens were converted to orchards in the first half of the 19th century.
In the mid 20th century, after periods of neglect, the "Blossoming Baroque" was opened in 1953. This continuous garden show initially did not take the historical garden structures into account, but instead attempted to "restore the magnificent Palace to its prominent role with a lively presentation". The wealth of flowers around the Palace and the fairy tale garden have been appreciated over the past several decades by hundreds of thousand of visitors. By the 300 year anniversary of the founding of Ludwigsburg Palace in 2004, the gardens around the former king's residence are to be presented again more or less as they appeared in 1800. On the way to this goal the royal private garden and the upper east garden have already been returned to their original states.