Old Botanical Garden of Göttingen University

About

The Old Botanical Garden of Göttingen University (German: Alter Botanischer Garten der Universität Göttingen or Alter Botanischer Garten Göttingen), 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 (1708–1777) 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 (converted in 1910 to a fern house). 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 (the Neuer Botanischer Garten der Universität Göttingen and the Forstbotanischer Garten und Arboretum), but the...