Glasshouses of the University of Fribourg Botanical Garden

The University of Fribourg Botanical Garden was founded in 1937 at the initiative of Professor Alfred Ursprung. Its first purpose was to supply living material for teaching botany to future doctors and pharmacists, and its earliest sections held medicinal, useful and aquatic plants. Wikipedia describes it as the youngest of Switzerland's four university botanical gardens.

As early as 1939 the university built a large tropical house. The collections grew between 1940 and 1963, and the garden opened to the public in 1948. In 1963 a small tropical house was added, together with a xerophyte and research house, which other sources describe as a temperate and cool house.

The following decades brought new outdoor sections, including a Valais steppe in 1988. An orangery was built in 1997-1998, followed in 2007 by a house dedicated to useful tropical plants. The rebuilt systematic section was inaugurated on 22 June 2017, and in 2023 the garden gained Bio Suisse organic certification.

The glasshouses form a small group of glazed, gable-roofed buildings on the western side of the garden, along the Chemin du Musée. They belong to several generations: the large tropical house of 1939, the houses of 1963, the orangery of 1997-1998 and the useful-plants house of 2007. None of the sources consulted names their architects or gives their dimensions.

The garden itself is compact, 1.8 hectares at about 650 metres above sea level in the Pérolles university quarter, between university buildings and the Natural History Museum. According to the Discovr online guide, the glasshouses show tropical and subtropical plants under controlled climatic conditions; the garden's website states that three of them are open to visitors.

The garden holds more than 5,000 plants, which Wikipedia puts at about a hundred families and some 1,600 species, arranged in around twenty themed sections. Three of them are under glass.

The tropical forest brings together decorative foliage plants, climbers, epiphytes and aquatic plants; the garden's website highlights an orchid of the genus Gongora, Coelogyne pandurata and Tacca chantrieri. The useful tropical plants house contains spices, starch plants, fruit trees and plants grown for oil, fibre, dye, medicine or as stimulants, among them Vanilla planifolia and Catharanthus roseus. The arid regions house shows cacti and other succulents from the Americas, Africa and the Mediterranean, such as Crassula ovata, Echidnopsis cereiformis and Eriocephalus africanus.

The garden lies on the Chemin du Musée, off the Boulevard de Pérolles, about fifteen minutes' walk from St Nicholas Cathedral and the old town. Fribourg's Natural History Museum is right next door, so the two visits combine easily.

An online guide suggests allowing at least an hour and a half for the garden and another half-hour for the glasshouses. Spring and summer are the best seasons for outdoor flowering, while in winter the glasshouses offer a tropical refuge.