Ausstellungskatalog - Botanischer Garten und Botanisches Museum ...

Präsentieren und Erklären 1910 – 2010 · Presenting and Explaining 1910 – 2010
The Staging of Science
The first press reports in 1910 hailed the finally opened Botanic
Garden in Dahlem as a ‘temple grove of science’. Adolf Engler’s
message had struck a chord. This garden was to be devoted primarily
to science. As Engler acknowledged in his speech at the opening
of the garden, ‘The Botanic Garden, however, has a duty to serve
not only the needs of scholars but also the general public, to awaken
and foster in them a joy in the forms and vital phenomena
of plants and to reveal botany to them as scientia amabilis’. He
wanted to appeal to wide circles of the population, to encourage
exact observation of the plant world and to entice people into what
was, at 42 hectares, the largest and most species-rich botanical
garden in Germany.
Enthroned in the middle of the conservatories, like the castle
within a royal estate, is the Main Tropical Greenhouse, and laid
out before it is the Italian Garden, which stands as a reference to
garden history with its ‘baroque’ hedges and yew cones. Beginning
at the foot of the glasshouses is the famous plant geographical section
conceived by Engler, which takes visitors on a trip around the
world. Science in the aesthetic guise of a landscape park, which
uses the advantages of the hilly terrain interspersed with ponds,
enabling both expert and stroller alike to journey through the empire
of botany on gently contoured paths. MH
135
Adolf Engler führt um 1920 eine Besuchergruppe durch die „Alpen“,
einen Teil der von ihm geplanten geographischen Abteilung in Dahlem.
BGBM, Archiv.