Old Botanical Garden of Göttingen University

Geschichte

The Old Botanical Garden of Göttingen University, with an area of 4.5 hectares, is an historic botanical garden maintained by the University of Göttingen. It is located in the Altstadt at Untere Karspüle 1, adjacent to the city wall, Göttingen, Lower Saxony, Germany, and open daily.The garden was established in 1736 by Albrecht von Haller as a hortus medicus, and gradually extended via adjacent plots within and without the city wall. By 1806 the garden had a tropical greenhouse, orangery, and cycad house; to these were added in 1830 an Araceae greenhouse, and again in 1857 a new orangery . Although the garden's collection of tropical plants was destroyed in the World War II, it was replenished postwar and augmented by a major collection of wild plants from central Europe. In 1967, as the university's natural science faculty began its relocation to a site north of the city center, two new botanical gardens were there established, but the old garden continues. In one of the most recent changes, its systematic garden was converted in 2003–2007 from a century-old taxonomic structure to one reflecting contemporary molecular genetics.