The former monastery garden located on our campus is an important part of the school’s sustainability concept, illustrating global processes on 0.2 hectares. Given the official school garden designation, it offers students the opportunity to learn the basics of organic gardening.
Together with groups of students, our garden educators work in and around the garden in both summer and winter: they dig, sow, prune branches and plant young trees. In addition to around 400 crops and 130 trees, the garden is also home to a clay oven built by the students for baking bread and pizza and a corner for bees, runner ducks, chickens and rabbits.
The former kitchen garden of the Carthusians, known in Alemannic as the Kuchelgarten, is located below the school building. A historic stone wall encloses the 2,000 square meter garden area with greenhouse, cold frames and the classic division of the parterre into four fields with a cross and central water basin. Unchanged in location and size for around 600 years, this area has served its changing owners over the centuries as a provider garden – Carthusian monks, aristocrats, residents of the retirement home, private families and, finally, UWC.
The garden has been cultivated organically since 1992. The large variety of crops also includes seed production and seedling cultivation. For example, the cultivation of the medicinal plant Angelica archangelica, which was already exported internationally in the days of the Carthusian monks, has been revived.
“I grew up in the neighboring Forsthaus, tended the garden for years and now, as a garden educator at RBC, I am responsible for passing on this knowledge to 200 curious young people from all over the world. What I particularly enjoy is the exchange between the students and the Freiburg garden volunteers: the team has existed for many years, they work together with the kids every Friday and also look after our beautiful garden during the school holidays. The program is truly a bridge to the city.”
If you would like to help out in the garden or visit the garden as part of a guided tour or workshop, please contact our garden educator.
A bridge to the city: every Friday afternoon between 3 p.m. and 6 p.m., the monastery garden of the former Charterhouse is transformed into a meeting place for gardening enthusiasts from Freiburg and the surrounding area. Whether young or old, experienced or inexperienced, already familiar with organic cultivation or wanting to find out more: there are many reasons to take part in the volunteer program.
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