Garten means garden, and this small pond lies a few hundred metres from the abbey wall, on ground that, going by the name, belonged to the monastery's gardens. A Cistercian house was meant to be self-sufficient, so its brothers and lay helpers tilled their own ground, kept bees, grew medicinal plants and managed their orchards, and the ponds supplied water for irrigation as well as for fish.
Maulbronn was founded in the middle of the twelfth century and prospered for nearly four hundred years before the Reformation. When the Duke of Württemberg took it over in the sixteenth century, it became a Protestant school, and the building continued in use for teaching until modern times. Poets and thinkers passed through its classrooms, among them the astronomer Johannes Kepler, the poet Friedrich Hölderlin and, later, Hermann Hesse, who ran away from the seminary after a few months and turned the experience into the novel Beneath the Wheel.
The surrounding country is the kind of place that rewards slow riding. Roads climb out of Maulbronn through woods and vineyards, pass farmhouses and small hamlets, and drop again into pretty valleys, with good surface and gentle corners. Traffic is light on weekdays, and autumn brings the smell of crushed grapes and wood smoke. Spring is lovely too, with blossom in the orchards.
Maulbronn itself, with about seven thousand people, has fuel, bakeries and a good choice of restaurants, many in old half-timbered houses. The local cooking is Swabian, with sturdy dishes like Maultaschen and roast beef with onions and a plate of spaetzle on the side, and the wine, which is mostly red, is very drinkable. For anything bigger, such as a large supermarket or a choice of petrol stations, the nearby towns have more.
Walk the path along the water and look back at the abbey roofs, which give a sense of how the monks fitted their buildings to the shape of the land. It is a short, restful stroll.