15 Years LehrLernGarten - Green Practice Grows from Grey Theory

09/30/2025

The Botanic Garden is celebrating the 15th anniversary of the LehrLernGarten project with a symposium. The symposium will take place on Thursday, 23 October 2025, at 2 pm in the Gregor Kraus Hall of the Botanic Garden.

For 15 years, the LehrLernGarten has been offering hands-on botany. (Image: Kerstin Bissinger / LehrLernGarten)

In October 2025, the award-winning LehrLernGarten (LLG) - meaning 'teaching and leraning garden' - project at the Botanical Garden of Julius-Maximilians-Universität Würzburg (JMU) will be 15 years old. The LehrLernGarten team is honouring the anniversary with a celebratory symposium.

The Programme of the Symposium

JMU President Professor Paul Pauli and the Director of the Botanical Garden, Professor Katharina Markmann, will open the event with welcoming speeches.

Keynote speaker Professor Bernd Overwien (HU Berlin) will give a lecture on the topic "Political plants? Fields of tension between ecology, politics and sustainability education". This will explain the significance and current relevance of the LehrLernGarten project, which will be explored in greater depth by Dr Gerd Vogg and Emily Schweitzer-Martin on the basis of the history and current project development.

This will be followed by a tour of the Botanic Garden's outdoor area and greenhouses to familiarise participants with the work of the TeachingLearningGarden using specific practical examples.

The event will conclude with a drink and a cosy get-together, which will provide an opportunity to exchange memories, new ideas and scientific perspectives.

The History of the LehrLernGartens

The aim of the project, which was launched in 2010, is to provide more practical experience in the biology teaching degree programme. Since then, the project has been further developed both in terms of the target group and the content focus. The LLG now serves as a practical platform for imparting knowledge on botanical topics with a focus on education for sustainable development (ESD).

Project Structure of the LehrLernGarten

As a practical platform, it enables students and school pupils to use the botanical garden as an extracurricular place of learning under supervision. This involves working hand in hand: Students develop and test ESD programmes in subject-specific and interdisciplinary courses, which are in turn visited by school classes. Each year, the LehrLernGarten attracts more than 2,000 visitors to its events.

The LehrLernGarten team is currently focussing on the topics of biodiversity, climate change, consumption and nutrition. Starting with plants that play an existential role in people's lives, the impact of humans on local and global ecosystems is analysed - from an ecological, economic and social perspective. Together with the students, the team develops and evaluates individual and collective options for action in terms of sustainable development.

In this way, JMU students from various degree programmes can deepen their knowledge of teaching content and try out suitable methods. For school classes, the visit to the extracurricular learning centre offers the opportunity to deal with topics from the curriculum in an interdisciplinary way and to become active themselves.

Awards for the LehrLernGarten

The project has been awarded the "Umweltbildung.Bayern" seal of quality by the Bavarian State Ministry of the Environment and Consumer Protection since 2018. In 2020, it also received the special "Social Nature - Nature for All" award from the UN Decade on Biodiversity and the Albrecht Fürst zu Castell-Castell Prize for Sustainable Action from the University of Würzburg.