Collections from the Chotobuz Botanical Garden
The botanical garden of the Institute of Botany of the Czech Academy of Sciences was established in 1963. This horticultural and collection garden with its extensive specialized plant cultures is located in Průhonice in a part called Chotobuz. The garden has a horticultural and exhibition area and continues with the Průhonice tradition in botanical and garden practice. Over the past years the collections of the Botanical gardens have been gradually transferred to the exhibition area. The oldest part of the Chotobuz gardens is the Rose garden (Rosarium) that has been open to the public through the Průhonice Park since the 1960s. The gardens on the whole cover about 20 hectares, of which a third is taken up by the exhibition area with working exhibits.
The Department of Gene Pool Collections maintains an extensive collection of the genera:
Iris - About 74 species (two sections of the genus) – section Spathula (86 cultivars) and section Iris (1375 cultivars). Together with Iris plants cultivated in Bohemia and Slovakia there were 1661 cultivars in 2002. Among them are cultivars that are more than 150 years old, which are now disappearing from other botanical gardens because they are no longer commercially attractive.
Hemerocallis - day-lilies: 16 species, 186 cultivars, 5000 plants.
Paeonia - 10 botanical taxons, 206 cultivars and about 10000 plants.
Rosa - Cultivated roses (691 cultivars, 3102 rose bushes) as well as dogroses (604 bushes of the original types and primary hybrids).
Nymphaea - water lilies: 198 cultivars, 1500 plants.
Rhododendron - There are some 160 species and many more cultivars of Rhododendron in the Park. At present the collections of the Institute of Botany include 80 species and 80 cultivars of Rhododendron.
These collections are compiled in such a way as to enable comparison of original botanical species, old cultivars (sometimes hundreds of years old) and modern products. The collection is especially valuable for its relative completeness of older cultivars of a specific origin that have disappeared from the assortment of other gardens. The collections are extremely useful for microevolutionary observations and testing hypotheses on the origin of trait combinations. The department also houses much older research on the botanical species Sorbus, Rosa, and Iris. Further expansion of the collection will directly increase its use for research. The collection is extremely valuable nationally and internationally.
Demonstrating the attractiveness of plants in our collections is not our main goal, but is a tool for documenting natural variability and their multipurpose use. Currently we should remember that the loss of any parts of our collection is irreversible, not only for the Czech Republic but also globally; some items in our collection no longer exist in any other part of the world. Our important mission and aim is not only to collect for study purposes, but also to protect endangered and vanishing plant species.
Below are the basic characteristics of the main collections of the Průhonice Botanical Gardens. Each of these collections provides and overview of the entire development, from wild plants to numerous examples of selections to derived cultural varieties.
Genera is ordered according to the main flowering periods. The numbers of grown species and varieties are rounded off to take into consideration the continuous changes in the composition and volume of the collections.
The composition of the individual collections in Průhonice are based on the following principles:
- selection of typical individuals for each species,
- representative selection of untypical individuals from natural populations in such a volume so as to characterize natural variability.
- selection of natural interspecific hybrids and ancient garden hybrids,
- selection from our own, experimental interspecific hybrids and even hybrids from between varieties and cultivars,
- maximum representation of historic varieties and cultivars – interspecific hybrids and vegetatively reproduced clones – described as species or botanical varieties and the predecessors to registered cultivars,
- an extensive overview of the development of cultivars in chronological order from the oldest preserved cultivars across their wide development to the current modern cultivars.
Information for visitors of the Chotobuz Botanical Garden
During the flowering period of the collection, usually from mid-May to the end of the summer, the garden is freely accessible from the Průhonice Park or through the operative entrance to the Experimental center of the Institute of Botany in Chotobuz. It is easiest to visit the gardens during working hours, weekdays from 8 am to 2:30 pm. Aside from weekdays, the garden is open on open house days (usually the last two Saturdays in May and the first two Saturdays in June). If our employees will have time, they can provide expert information to scientists and groups who have given advance notice with specifics of which expert field is of interest.
