Arboretum Brno, Educational arboretum in Ponava, Czech Republic.
Arboretum Brno is an educational garden spanning 11 hectares in Ponava with over 4,000 orchid species, 2,000 perennials, and 4,000 types of woody plants. The collection is organized in climate-controlled greenhouses and open beds throughout the grounds.
A small botanical garden was created near the agricultural college in 1926; in 1938 August Bayer founded a 2-hectare arboretum about 500 metres from the school building. In 1967 the school's expansion forced a new garden, built from 1968 to Ivar Otruba's design with Antonín Nohel and Josef Holzbecher, and the area grew to 11 hectares.
The garden is used for wedding ceremonies and hosts exhibitions several times a year. Its five sections carry thematic names, among them the Southern Slopes, the Central Part, the Old Arboretum and the Botanical System, where medicinal, useful and poisonous plants are grouped separately.
The grounds lie at 220–250 m above sea level, with an average annual temperature of 8.4 °C and 547 mm of rainfall per year. The area is divided into five themed sections, from the greenhouses and sunken beds by the administration building to the botanical system with its garden for the blind. The soil is loess over calcareous clay, partly on artificial fill left after clay extraction.
The garden's layout was designed in 1968 by professor Ivar Otruba with dendrologist Antonín Nohel and rock-garden specialist Josef Holzbecher; it is counted among the notable Czech landscape-architecture works of the late 20th century. The old arboretum section keeps the original 1938 woody-plant collection.
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