Giessen Botanical Garden
The Gießen Botanical Garden, established in 1609, is the oldest botanical garden in Germany and is still in its original location today.
History and environment
The city of Giessen was a state fortress in the 16th century. Bastions and ramparts were last rebuilt in 1560–1566 according to generous plans. This fortification was so powerful that the city had not yet filled the area by 1850. The course of the old city fortifications can still be traced in the system ring. The botanical garden is located on the eastern edge of the former fortress wall, under an artificial hill there are still remains of the wall.
In the 19th century, Giessen was considered a "garden city". When the ramparts were removed from 1805 and the moat was filled in, these areas were greened. According to this, the proportion of gardens and parks in relation to the core city was 56 percent. In addition to the botanical garden, there were private vegetable, fruit and pleasure gardens. The schools had their own teaching gardens, there was an official garden at the old castle , and garden restaurants such as Steins' garden (now a hotel on the mountain food) were well attended. In addition, almost all Wilhelminian style villas were surrounded by park-like green spaces. In 1888 40 percent of the city's area was still made up of gardens and parks, today it is only 15 percent.
founding
Gardens in Leipzig (1580), Heidelberg (1597) and Eichstätt (1600) had already been laid out in front of the Botanical Garden in Giessen. In 1607, Landgrave Ludwig V founded the university that was then named after him and two years later also gave it a garden. This was located behind the college building on Brandplatz (the foundation stone was laid in 1607, no longer exists today) and was bordered on the other side by the extension of Sonnenstraße.
From the beginning, the university also included a medical faculty, and botany, as understood at the time, was primarily about medicinal plants. The physician and botanist Ludwig Jungermann (1572–1653) laid out the hortus medicus on an area of initially 1200 square meters. The oldest German local flora comes from Jungermann , including a Flora von Gießen published in 1623 , which has however been lost.
A permanent wintering house was set up in 1699, and the first glass house was built in 1720, which was only demolished in 1859. The name “Botanical University Garden” can be identified for the first time in 1733.
Forest garden
Friedrich Ludwig Walther (1759–1824) founded forest science in Giessen . For this purpose he set up a university forest garden in 1802 on the adjacent site to the east. When the ramparts were razed after 1805, the newly gained area was incorporated. The forest garden was moved to its current location at the foot of the Schiffenberg in 1825 , but the botanical garden has retained the magnificent trees. Between two plane trees, a cast iron monument commemorates Walther.
The separate facilities were merged into a common garden of around three hectares in 1826, but the old three-way division of hortus medicus , the first expansion areas and the former forest garden can still be seen today. When the university administration moved into the new main building in Ludwigstrasse in 1880, the grounds of the college building were also added to the botanical garden.
Selected Head of the Botanical Garden
Johann Bernhard Wilbrand (1799–1846), who headed the Giessen Botanical Garden from 1817, achieved the amalgamation of the Botanical Garden and the adjacent forest garden area. The forest garden was newly laid out on Schiffenberg. Wilbrand published the first seed catalog ( index seminum ) of the Botanical Gardens in 1824 , five years later the exchange of seeds with 24 botanical gardens could be reported.
After leaving the medical faculty, Alexander Braun (1805–1877) was the first representative of botany in Giessen, but he only stayed eight months. His successor was Hermann Hoffmann (1819-1891), the founder of phenology . From 1891, Adolf Hansen (1851–1920) fundamentally redesigned the garden according to more recent systematic aspects. In 1908 he published the 112-page “Guide to the Botanical Garden in Giessen”. At the beginning of the 20th century, a large tropical house was the main attraction of the Botanical Garden; it was destroyed by bombs in 1944. An abundance of old, extremely valuable stocks were also destroyed by bombs.
Ernst Küster (1874–1953), for whom his successor Dietrich von Denffer (1914–2007) had a memorial erected opposite the old castle, began to rebuild the heavily damaged garden after the Second World War. An important botanist and long-time director of the botanical garden after the war was Dietrich von Denffer from 1951 to 1976, one of the main authors (1958 to 1990) of the international standard work “Textbook of Botany for Universities” (“ Strasburger ”). He put on a new department for medicinal and poisonous plants as well as a historical department, set up the “plateau with the gazelle” and a “castle garden” at the old castle, had the Alpinum re-established and new greenhouses built and made the garden popular by in the 1950s he had it opened to the general public without reservation and held serenade evenings in the open air between the plants. In 1961, during Denffer's term of office, the new building of the Botanical Institute in Senckenbergstrasse opposite the Botanical Garden, built according to his plans, was completed and occupied.
Today the Botanical Garden is used for research and teaching for students of biology, agricultural sciences, geography, medicine and veterinary medicine. It contains around 8,000 different plant species, most of which are signposted in German and Latin. The main entrance is somewhat hidden at the end of Sonnenstrasse at the rear of the old castle. A second entrance is on Senckenbergstrasse at number 17 (Hermann Hoffmann Academy for Young Researchers, former Botanical Institute).
See also
literature
- Hans-Joachim Weimann : Gardens of the Ludoviciana. Lust and frustration history and stories . Biebertal 2001
- (cg): It started with the "Hortus medicus". The Justus Liebig University is celebrating the 375th anniversary of the Botanical Garden in the coming week , Gießener Allgemeine, June 9, 1984, number 134, page 31
Web links
- Homepage of the Botanical Garden of the Justus Liebig University Giessen
- Literature on the Gießen Botanical Garden in the Hessian Bibliography
Coordinates: 50 ° 35 ′ 11 " N , 8 ° 40 ′ 44" E