Aachen Botanical Garden

from Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
Organic garden

The Aachen Botanical Garden is a special garden in Aachen that was first laid out in 1885 as part of the Aachen City Garden . Since the 1930s, it has been taken over as an institution of the RWTH Aachen University and after several moves it has been refurbished in the gardens of Hofgut Melaten , where it has been part of the Freundeskreis Botanischer Garten Aachen e. V. is maintained and administered. It consists of the Karlsgarten , a smaller area for the organic plant collection and further cultivation and experimental areas. It is no longer officially referred to as a botanical garden, but rather as the Aachen Biological Center for Ecology and Environmental Communication according to the statutes of the Freundeskreis .

History of the garden

The botanical garden was initially laid out in 1885 as part of the Aachen city garden with a size of 0.5 ha. It comprised three large beds within this park, in which mainly plants with beautiful flowers were planted, as well as an area of ​​1764 m². Thanks to the support of various German and foreign universities, the garden had an extensive collection of plants shortly after it was founded. When the Botanical Garden was founded, a first botanical association was also founded in Aachen.

In addition, an experimental garden with medicinal plants was laid out in 1898 next to the main building of the Technical University .

After the former Lochner cloth factory , Villa Lochner and the associated garden on Karlsgraben / Mauerstraße had to be sold to the Reich Treasury in 1928 and the Aachen University of Technology had taken over this complex, a crop garden was laid out around 1936 on the area of ​​the former private garden . This was under the direction of Alphons Theodor Czaja (1894-1984), since 1936 head of the botanical institute of the university, and served until 1953 as a teaching garden for students of pharmacy as well as for future food technicians . During the Third Reich mainly fiber plants were cultivated there.

Between 1953 and 1955 this garden was moved from Mauerstraße to Alte Maastrichter Straße 30 (today Melatener Straße 30) and in 1963 it was officially converted into a botanical garden of the RWTH Aachen. The registered association Freundeskreis Botanischer Garten Aachen was founded in 1985 and has taken care of the garden since then.

Bio-cybernetic center Aachen

From 1987 the Freundeskreis campaigned publicly for the creation of a new botanical garden in Aachen. The city of Aachen then had potential alternative locations checked by the green space office. On November 15, 1990, the Environment Committee decided to recommend the city council to build a botanical garden at Hofgut Melaten, which is also owned by RWTH Aachen University, and to commission the administration to create the necessary legal planning requirements .

In 1993, the Friends of the Botanical Garden and the Young Landscape Architects Working Group in the Association of German Landscape Architects announced a planning competition for the construction of a Biological Center Aachen for Ecology and Environmental Education (BIOZAC, today: Biocybernetic Center Aachen ), which should be scientifically oriented and the criteria of a Botanical Garden aims to meet. The main focus of this center is to concentrate on environmental education work, which can be supported by the institute's own herbarium and library. Another focus will be placed on botanical research work to preserve biodiversity.

Karlsgarten at Gut Melaten

After the planning competition was successfully completed in 1993, the Freundeskreis signed a long-term lease agreement with the state of North Rhine-Westphalia for a 6-hectare area at Gut Melaten in 1996 with the approval of RWTH Aachen University and the NRW Ministry of Science . The first construction phases included the construction of the Karlsgarten, which opened in 2000, the near-natural maintenance of the Dorbach with the construction of a water garden and the construction of ponds in the Raven Valley. A few meters south of the Karlsgarten is another show garden that houses the organic plant collection.

In 2004, the Bio-cybernetic Center Aachen was one of the initiators of Europom, an annual conference in different European countries on the topic of preserving the diversity of fruit varieties . As part of this commitment, a meadow orchard with various old types of fruit was created at Gut Melaten .

See also

literature

  • Matthias Hubert Debey: A guide through botanical gardens, in particular through the botanical garden of Aachen. Benrath & Vogelsang, Aachen, 1880
  • Heinz W. Hallmann: The botanical garden in Aachen. In: Garden and Landscape , Volume 99, 1989, Issue 1, pp. 36–41
  • Aachen. RWTH Aachen Botanical Garden. In: Loki Schmidt (ed.): The botanical gardens in Germany. Hoffmann and Campe, Hamburg, 1997, pp. 14-17

Web links

Commons : Biological Center Aachen  - Collection of images, videos and audio files

Individual evidence

  1. ↑ Edmund Goeze: Botanical Gardens and Institutes: A guide through botanical gardens, in particular through the botanical garden of Aachen. In: Botanisches Centralblatt , 1880, pp. 638–639
  2. ↑ Bodo von Koppen: Alt-Aachener Gärten , Rudolf Georgi Verlag, Aachen 1987, p. 68
  3. ↑ a b Botanical Garden of the RWTH Aachen. in the information system "University Collections in Germany", accessed on August 22, 2018
  4. ↑ Friends of the Botanical Garden Aachen
  5. ↑ Karlsgarten
  6. ^ A b c Karl Josef Strank: Report on the status of the development of the BIOlogical Center AAChen in spring 1999 , 1999
  7. ↑ Europom - care and maintenance program for orchards in the Euregio. on the Biozac homepage, accessed on August 23, 2018

Coordinates: 50 ° 46 ′ 46.6 "  N , 6 ° 2 ′ 44.4"  E