Planten un Blomen

Planten un Blomen covers forty-seven hectares in central Hamburg, parkland between the shopping streets, the university and the cultural centres. Dammtor station sits at one entrance, so you walk in straight off a city street. The Old Botanical Garden, a large playground and several themed gardens spread across the grounds.

The site began as Hamburg's old fortifications, which the city replaced with a green belt in the early nineteenth century. Johann Georg Christian Lehmann planted the first tree there, a plane, in November 1821, and it still stands near the Dammtor entrance. Parts of today's park once carried a zoo and a cemetery. The park took its present form in 1933 with German plants alone, a choice that mirrored the ideology of those years. International Horticulture Shows later widened the botanical range.

A Japanese garden gathers exotic plants around rock formations and a teahouse. Fig and lemon trees fill the Mediterranean section, and the greenhouses hold biotopes under glass. An Apothecary's Garden and a Rose Garden sit among them. Water-light concerts, public theatre and music performances play out in the open air. In summer the park carries more than three hundred rose varieties in flower at once.