Průhonická botanická zahrada, Botanical garden in Průhonice, Czech Republic.
Průhonická botanická zahrada is a botanical garden on the Chotobuz site in Průhonice, part of the Botanical Institute of the Czech Academy of Sciences. Its 3.5-hectare visitor garden, laid out by architect Ivar Otruba, holds collections of irises, peonies, daylilies, roses and rhododendrons, with a lawn, evergreen trees and a band of pink, red and white flowering shrubs.
The garden was established in 1963 following an agreement between the Czechoslovak Academy of Sciences and the Ministry of Agriculture to create a specialized space for ornamental plant research. It built upon the knowledge and land of an earlier institute dedicated to decorative gardening.
The garden's name Chotobuz refers to its site, and its collections began with wild roses gathered by Dr. Ivan Klášterský, cultivated roses of Prof. Pravdomil Svoboda and irises of Mgr. Milan Blažek. Since 2006 the iris collection has been part of the National Programme for Conservation and Use of Plant Genetic Resources, joined in 2015 by peonies and daylilies, all recorded in the EVIGEZ system.
The garden lies within the Průhonice Park tour circuit, and its collection part was long opened to the public only on weekend events. A separate 3.5 ha exhibition garden, built to Ivara Otruba's design after a 1994 grant, now holds representative selections of the collections.
The garden preserves historical plant varieties that have disappeared from cultivation elsewhere and are valuable for scientific research. These older cultivars help researchers understand how plants changed across generations of breeding.
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