Monastery garden of the Charterhouse Freiburg, Monastic garden in Freiburg im Breisgau, Germany.
The monastery garden of the Charterhouse Freiburg is a structured garden with sections for medicinal herbs, vegetables, and fruit trees arranged in geometric patterns within stone-walled areas. The layout shows how monks systematically cultivated plants while integrating cultivation with their daily routines.
The Charterhouse was founded in 1346, not in 1278. Between 1753 and 1756 the whole complex was rebuilt in Baroque style, and the kitchen garden was laid out in its present form. The monastery was dissolved in 1782 under Emperor Joseph II; the cloister and monks' cells were demolished and the grounds turned into a park, while the kitchen garden stayed untouched. It later supplied the residents of the nursing home.
The garden's name in Alemannic, Kuchelgarten, marks its former role as the kitchen garden supplying the monks, who ate no meat. Its fame rested on the medicinal angelica (Archangelica officinalis) grown here in quantity; the herbalist Tabernaemontanus wrote in 1580 that Freiburg's Carthusian monks sold it across Germany and abroad. Since 1992 it has been worked organically as a cottage garden, with roses, a small apiary and a flock of running ducks against slugs.
The garden lies on a south slope below the former charterhouse, about 3 km east of Freiburg's centre above Kartäuserstraße, enclosed by a wall of broken stone up to 3 m high. Its 2000 m² are divided classically into four beds with a crossing path and a central water basin; historic greenhouses stand on the grounds.
The garden's fame rests on medicinal angelica (Archangelica officinalis): the herbalist Tabernaemontanus wrote in 1580 that the monks of Freiburg Charterhouse grew it in great quantity and sold it beyond Germany. Since the 1990s Angelica archangelica has been cultivated here again, its root once used against digestive complaints.
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