Collection Greenhouse of the Medicinal Plant Garden, Faculty of Pharmacy of Charles University (sbírkový skleník)

The garden was born with the Faculty of Pharmacy of Charles University in Hradec Králové: founded in 1969-1970 according to Czech Wikipedia, it first served as a teaching pavilion on rented land. The idea of a proper medicinal plant garden dates from 1970, and a small plot was obtained two years later. The greenhouses that faculty staff built themselves soon proved too expensive to heat with oil, which ruled out growing tropical plants out of season. Several studies for a larger garden between 1972 and 1989 came to nothing.

After 1989 the faculty obtained a new plot from the city, on the site of a former landfill and nursery; in 1992 the garden became a separate facility of the faculty. Wikipedia places the start of building in 1990 and a 2010 article in 1992; the teaching and operations building with its greenhouses, of modern design, was completed in 2000, and the greenhouses were commissioned in November that year. In 2005 the garden was among the founding members of the Union of Botanical Gardens of the Czech Republic. When the current head arrived in 2014, more than a hundred tonnes of rubble from the old landfill had to be moved, the Charles University newspaper reports; a rose garden was created in 2015, and the pharmacy educational trail opened around 2019.

The collection greenhouse (sbírkový skleník) is attached to the west side of the teaching and operations building, whose modern design answers the needs of the faculty and the garden. It covers 370 to 380 m² and reaches up to 8 metres in height. On the north-east side of the same building are three growing greenhouses, a table house, a propagation house and a bed house, of about 110 m² in all, used for propagating plants and for teaching.

The building also holds the garden's workspaces, a drying room, a store for medicinal plants, a laboratory and seminar rooms; the tropical teaching greenhouse adjoins it directly. A pond lies in front of it, and the thirteenth and last panel of the educational trail, devoted to tropical medicinal plants, stands inside, near the spices.

The greenhouse grows more than 120 species from the tropics and subtropics, a little under half of them medicinal or pharmaceutically significant. An article in the journal Léčivé rostliny (2010) names, among others, soursop (Annona muricata), Ceylon cinnamon (Cinnamomum zeylanicum), Monstera deliciosa, ginger (Zingiber officinale), giant granadilla (Passiflora quadrangularis), Serenoa repens, tea tree (Melaleuca alternifolia), whose essential oil is prized for its antibacterial action, Centella asiatica, aloe (Aloe vera) and a eucalyptus (Eucalyptus globulus).

The Charles University newspaper and Czech Radio Hradec add vanilla, a fruiting banana, papaya, black pepper climbing a fig tree, date palm, cardamom, mango and a thorny caper bush, as well as a Monstera that bears fruit. Visitors are warned about a Trinidad Scorpion Moruga chilli rated at up to 2.5 million Scoville units. Small toads act as biological control against insects.

The garden lies on Botanická ulice, between the Brno road (Brněnská) and Pajkrova flošna, a remnant of the time when Hradec Králové was a military fortress. It opens from April to October: the greenhouse can be visited freely for a voluntary donation, or on a weekend guided tour that covers the outdoor area and then the greenhouse. Around it are the rose garden planted in 2015 (about 300 roses of 50 varieties from the Meilland/Richardier house), peonies (more than 100 taxa), a French garden, the roof garden of the administrative building and the thirteen-stop educational trail that ends in the greenhouse. Roses were still in bloom in September, according to Radio Hradec.