Teaching in the seminary park school garden

Jyväskylä was chosen as the location for the first primary school teacher seminar due to its central location. In addition, the first Finnish-language secondary schools in Finland (Jyväskylä Lyceum and Jyväskylä School for Girls) were already operating there. Cygnaeus became the first director of the seminary, and the seminary became the beginning of the entire Finnish, democratic and equal education system, as women also studied at the seminary and its students came from different social classes.

Cygnaeus' elementary school programme also included the idea of school gardens, through which the doctrine of horticulture and agriculture was spread to the whole nation through the graduates of the teachers' institution. Horticultural education was part of the education curriculum of the Jyväskylä Teacher Seminary since the seminary was founded in 1863.

At first, the students were given a plot of land to plant and manage around the current Lounaispuisto park area, but when Seminaarinmäki was completed in 1883, horticultural education was also given permanent operating areas in the Seminary Park.

In the beginning the school garden consisted mainly of sample crops, an orchard, plants beds, and later, in the early 1900s, also the pupils' own allotments and large fields for a kitchen garden at the western end of the area. A greenhouse was also located in the park, and a lot of teaching was held there.

The ornamental plants and structures in the landscape park were also felt to have an exemplary, educational and health-promoting effect on pupils. The actual regulated teaching of horticulture began at the seminary in the academic year 1898-99, when it was seen that the teaching of agriculture and horticulture in the growing elementary school system had remained incomplete and too exemplary.

During the term of seminary's gardeners K.M. Ståhlberg (1891-1908) and Kalle Kalervo (1909-10), practical teaching became permanent and regular. The general boom in horticulture in Finland at the turn of the century also played a role.

The main focus of horticultural education was largely on practical work, but the theoretical subjects taught included, for example, in 1906-07 the importance of gardening, the establishment of a garden, fertilizing and cultivating the land, fertilizer making and their chemistry, and the emergence of cultural crops. In the 1920s, natural history teaching topics are mentioned to have been such as plant structure, plant systems (tribes) and vital functions of plants.

Practical horticultural education gradually ceased in Jyväskylä in the 1960s when the university began its operations. The inventories of the plant collections of the University of Jyväskylä began in the 1970s and the collections were formed into a botanical garden in 1990. The collection includes approximately 18,000 plant specimens, the oldest of which have survived from the teachers' seminary in the 1880s.

In the picture from the 1930s, one of the most important memorial trees in Seminary Park that has survived to the present day: the Seminary Spruce (forest spruce), planted in memory of the teacher-seminary in 1937. At that time, the seminary was transformed into a matriculation-based educational college. The plaque reads: "Seminary fir, planted by the Seminary Fellowship and received by the Student Union of the School of Education". JYU Science Museum Collections K1759:31.