Botanischer Garten der Universität Ulm

The Botanischer Garten der Universität Ulm covers twenty-eight hectares in Ulm, Germany, a university-run botanical garden and arboretum dating from 1981. The ground served as a shooting range before the garden began, and the university extended it over the following twenty years. A walk today moves through separate areas, each with its own character, from trees to flowers to open grass.

The themes cover a medicinal garden, a daylily garden, a cottage garden, a pond and a meadow. The first greenhouses went up in 1986, and two tropical ones joined them in 1997. The arboretum took shape between 1992 and 1996, and a farmer's garden came in 1998. A rose garden arrived between 1999 and 2000. The herb garden followed in 2001, in partnership with the pharmaceutical company Ratiopharm.

The garden also serves as the university's central scientific facility. Its herbarium holds around eighty thousand specimens, with a focus on Europe, South America and Central America. About fifty thousand of those come from the tropics, and twenty thousand are mosses and lichens. The green classroom brings children into natural habitats and greenhouses for hands-on learning. Workshops, guided tours and exhibitions put the science in visitors' hands. The pond and the meadow are where a visit goes quiet.