Garden portraits

Around the world in a few hours: the 16 ha outdoor area gives you an insight into the flora of the whole world. The plant geography section invites you to wander through the forests, heathland, moors, steppes, and dunes of the temperate northern hemisphere. It is just a short walk to pass from North America to China, Japan, Korea, and over the Himalayas to Europe, and to discover nature again and again in the changing seasons.

The greenhouses are the architectural eye-catchers of the ÖBG. Most of the world's known plant species are native to the tropics and subtropics. In our various climate-controlled greenhouses you can stroll through tropical lowland rainforest, through dry forest, through the endangered laurel forest flora of the Canary Islands (cloud-forest house), and through mangroves. Special features are the greenhouse for tropical high mountain plants, and several thousand individual plants from the subtropical and Mediterranean climate zone that spend the summer outdoors and the winter in a cool greenhouse as potted plants.

The extensive crop plants garden is located in the very south of the ÖBG. Thriving here every summer are over 700 different species and varieties of vegetables and spices, cereals, pseudo-cereals, millet, oil, fibre and dye plants, energy crops, summer flowers, and rare weeds of crop fields. The newly created medicinal herb garden with detailed information panels invites you to linger and study. On the expansive orchard, grazed by Coburg Fox sheep in summer, there are over a hundred old and new varieties of apples, pears, plums, cherries, and quinces planted. In summer, we present a select group of plants as part of the annual garden topic in a specific garden section of the crop plants garden.

The ÖBG is an ecological-botanical garden because of its great diversity of plant species and its small-scale mosaic of various habitats such as dunes and heaths, dry grasslands and steppes, forests and waters, wet meadows, and bogs. Together they offer ideal conditions for an uncommonly rich fauna, such as the 176 types of wild bee and 170 bug species, 112 bird, nine amphibian and 16 bat species, as well as many other animal species. In large part, these species have settled here of their own accord.