Pruhonický park / Pruhonice Park (Central Bohemia)
N 50° 00.064 E 014° 33.529
33U E 468382 N 5538842
The Pruhonice Park, which lies southeast of the Prague suburbs in a small town of Pruhonice, is one of the most valuable and beautiful natural English-type parks and arboretums in the European context...
Waymark Code: WMMCDV
Location: Středočeský kraj, Czechia
Date Posted: 08/31/2014
Views: 54
The Pruhonice Park, which lies southeast of the Prague suburbs in a small town of Pruhonice, is one of the most valuable and beautiful natural English-type parks and arboretums in the European context.
The Park, daily opened for the public, with its extensive gene pool collection of domestic and introduced species is part of the Institute of Botany of the Czech Academy of Sciences.
The given WM coordinates mark the main entrance to the Park.
The Pruhonice natural park (the area of 250 hectares) was founded in the year 1885 by the Count Arnošt Emanuel Silva-Tarouca. He took advantage of the pictoresque valley of the Botic creek and its tributaries, the Dobrejovický and Zdimerický streams. He introduced both native and woody species to the park. The bases of the park composition were open spaces that he set up in a brilliant way. He combined woody plants, groups of trees and brushes with meadows, ponds, streams and their dead meanders. He used the changeability of woody plants in different seasons of the year with great skill. The result of his lifelong hard work is an original masterpiece of garden landscape architecture of worldwide importance.
Apart from its artistic and historic significance, the park is also valuable from the dendrological point of view. Today over 1702 botanical species and their cultivars (336 taxa of evergreen trees and 1161 taxa of deciduous trees and 205 taxa of perennials) are registered in the Index plantarum of the Arboretum of the Pruhonice Park. This list with a total of 2136 items stems from a summary of the previous inventories and written reports of the occurrence of individual species in the park.
The valuable collections of plants in the garden are used as the gene pool in the adjacent Botanical Garden in Chotobuz (located at the NE borders of the Park), with a collection of conifer cones also belonging to the garden.
The park itself is the most significant landscape element southeast of Prague and an important haven for the variety of organisms in this part of the country. The Pruhonice Park is a UNESCO World Heritage Site and Czech National Historic Landmark.