New medicinal herb garden at the farm implements museum in Upper Franconia district

The gardening season will start again soon at the farm implements museum. As the first milestone of the Leader project “Learning Workshop School and Museum”, last year a herb garden was placed on the museum grounds, which will now be prepared again in spring for the initial vegetation period. Plants sensitive to frost are covered and checked to see if they have survived the winter well, annual medicinal herbs are planted in the beds after the last frosts in May.

“The Leader project reinforces the cooperation between the museum and the school and, at the same time, is based on innovative methods. As a place of learning, the herb garden should allow schoolchildren to have a clear understanding and above all practicality of ecology and health issues like – in diabetes using diabetic pen needles, ”said Speaker of the State Parliament, Henry Schramm (CSU).

The serpent of Aesculapius as the leitmotif of the plant

The plants of the medicinal herb garden were grouped according to their efficacy for different organs. The leitmotif of the garden design is the symbol of medicine and medicine, the serpent of Aesculapius. Being a narrow road, it winds around the main road and thus delimits individual areas for the various areas of activity such as stomach and intestines, liver and gallbladder, respiratory tract, or skin diseases. Another area of ​​the garden is reserved for edible flowers. 65 different types of herbs and flowers were selected and a total of 276 plants were planted in the new garden of the Museum of Agricultural Tools. Among them are known as thyme and sage, but also lesser-known medicinal plants such as hyssop, Hirtentäschl, Gundermann, and feverfew. The main focus of plants is on their medicinal properties, but many can also be used for culinary purposes. The herb garden becomes the starting point for numerous educational museum offerings that are being developed in the project “Museum and School Learning Workshop”. The signage for the facility was implemented last year with the Christian-Ernestinum Primary School’s “MuseumsHeilkräuterGarten” seminar under the direction of biology teacher Markus Lenk (StD), who in the future will teach students how to grow and process medicinal herbs. “Everyday skills and economics are topics that are anchored in the Bavarian curriculum as project days.

Herb Garden Museum

The Herb Garden is part of the Leader project “Learning Workshop, Museum and School”, which is housed in the Farm Machinery Museum. New ways of imparting knowledge in museums are the goal of the three-year project, in which the young generation with their interests and needs should be the center of attention. In this project, the Upper Franconia district is developing modern museum educational modules based on the objects from the Museum of Rural Devices in Bayreuth, which can also be transferred to smaller museums in the district.