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Allotment Gardens
Germany has around nine hundred thousand allotment gardens, Kleingärten, most of them in colonies on the edges of cities and along railway lines. The movement grew in the nineteenth century, when city dwellers needed space to grow food and get fresh air; the everyday name Schrebergarten honors Moritz Schreber, a Leipzig doctor whose followers founded one of the first garden associations. Allotments are governed by a federal law, which keeps rents low and requires that the gardens be used partly for growing fruit and vegetables, not just as lawns for relaxing. The summerhouse may not be a permanent residence, and when a tenant leaves, an assessor usually values the plants and buildings to set the transfer payment. Each colony is run by an elected club board, which writes its own garden regulations. The allotment long had a reputation for being stuffy, with hedges cut to regulation height and garden gnomes. In recent decades, however, many colonies have become popular with young families and city dwellers of every background, and in big cities the waiting lists can run to several years.