Botanical Garden and Botanical Museum

This guide to Berlin's Botanical Garden and Botanical Museum centers on the night in March 1943 when bombs set the herbarium ablaze, destroying four million pressed specimens from one of the world's largest plant collections. It traces the quiet decision, made just days earlier, to move the rarest type specimens into the basement, and a second raid that autumn that shattered greenhouse glass and destroyed two irreplaceable coco de mer palms. The garden itself began decades earlier as an ordinary Prussian potato field.