Show Glasshouses of the Kiel University Botanical Garden (Schaugewächshäuser)

Kiel's botanical garden is among the oldest in Germany. Johann Daniel Major, professor of theoretical medicine and botany, laid it out in 1669 as a physic garden in part of the castle grounds, only four years after Christian-Albrechts-Universität was founded. It moved several times: to a former monastery on today's Falckstraße in 1727, to the academic hospital in 1802 and, in 1873, to a site near the Kiel Fjord that the botanist Adolf Engler arranged strictly by plant geography.

That site, now known as the Alter Botanischer Garten, eventually proved too small, and the university built a new garden on its campus between Leibnizstraße and Olof-Palme-Damm. Sources date the work differently: English Wikipedia gives 1975 to 1978, while German Wikipedia says the move was completed in 1978 and the glasshouses were finished in stages up to 1985. Garden and display houses have been open to students and the general public since 6 June 1985.

The collection has since gained further houses, among them a carnivorous-plant house paid for by the garden's friends' association. In 2019 the garden marked the 350th anniversary of its foundation.

The display glasshouses form a compact group, which the university presents as a sequence of houses with distinct climates. The largest is the tropical house, a warm house about 18 metres high with a floor area of about 800 m², kept hot and humid. The seven main display houses together cover roughly 3,000 m².

Each house recreates a setting. The cloud-forest house is held at around 16 °C with humidity near 90 per cent. The Mediterranean and arid houses are cool houses: winter nights fall to 5–10 °C, and humidity in the two desert houses is about 30 per cent. The Victoria house holds heated pools for tropical aquatic plants. An inner courtyard contains the carnivorous-plant house, and a three-part house devoted to lotus and to the flora of Gondwana stands near the main entrance.

The garden grows about 14,000 species in all. The tropical house brings together epiphytes, climbers, palms, bananas, orchids including vanilla, cacao and bromeliads, along with poison dart frogs. The cloud-forest house is dominated by ferns, tree ferns among them, and by a giant horsetail six metres tall.

The subtropical house concentrates on the flora of the Atlantic islands (Canaries, Cape Verde, Madeira) and on many useful plants. The American arid house keeps specimens of Echinocactus grusonii around 120 years old, and the African house shows aloes, spurges and an unusually large Cyphostemma currorii that has become the garden's emblem. In the Victoria house, giant water lilies with leaves over two metres across grow alongside the titan arum, which has flowered regularly since 2012 and produced two inflorescences at once in 2018.

The glasshouses lie on the university campus near the 'Botanischer Garten' bus stop and are seen together with the eight-hectare outdoor garden, arranged by geographical region with an alpine garden, a rhododendron slope and a medicinal garden. Allow one to two hours for everything. Winter suits the Victoria house, where the giant water lilies often flower from January, while the lotus is a summer display. The Alter Botanischer Garten near the fjord makes a historical complement to the visit.