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The allotment has a constitution
Around a million German households rent a Schrebergarten — a small allotment plot, usually with a hut, clustered into a colony behind a railway line or at the edge of town. They date from the nineteenth century, when a Leipzig doctor named Schreber lent his name to the movement for giving city children somewhere green, and they are now as much about the weekend as about vegetables. What surprises outsiders is how regulated they are. Federal law requires that a third of the plot be given over to fruit and vegetables rather than lawn; the hut may not exceed twenty-four square meters and you are not allowed to live in it; hedge heights, tree species and quiet hours are all set out in the colony's statutes, and an elected committee enforces them. Waiting lists in Berlin and Munich run to years. The result is a very German kind of leisure: deeply relaxing, and governed by a written constitution that everyone has read.