Glasshouses of the Květná zahrada (Flower Garden)

The Květná zahrada, or Flower Garden, was commissioned in the second half of the 17th century by Bishop Karl von Liechtenstein-Castelcorn (Karel z Lichtenštejna-Kastelkornu), who held office from 1664 to 1695. Known at first as a 'libosad', or pleasure garden, it was created in two campaigns: the first, from 1665 to 1675, was directed by the Italian architect Filiberto Lucchese and, after his death in 1666, by Giovanni Pietro Tencalla; the second followed in the 1680s.

In the 19th century Archbishop Maximilian Joseph von Sommerau-Beeckh, in office from 1837 to 1853, wished to open the garden more widely to the public and added several glasshouses; at the same time the garden became the botanical and practical back-up of the palace. Between 1840 and 1845 the architect Anton Arch (1793–1851) designed the court of honour (Čestný dvůr): an entrance building that housed the garden staff, flanked by two glasshouses. The triangular pediment over the gateway bears the initials M and J on either side of the archbishop's gilded coat of arms.

The architect Pavel Janák led a revival of the garden in the 1950s. Inscribed on UNESCO's World Heritage List in 1998 together with the archbishop's palace, the site, run by the National Heritage Institute (Národní památkový ústav), was restored with more than 300 million crowns of European funding as part of the National Centre for Garden Culture project; the garden was ceremonially reopened on 6 and 7 September 2014.

The court of honour is a classicist group of three buildings arranged around a courtyard that opens onto the garden: the entrance in the middle and a glasshouse on either side. The two houses differ in size and purpose. The smaller is the warm house, known as the Palm House; it has a timber roof structure and keeps a roof light of considerable historic value. Its restoration involved rebuilding that roof light, repairing the roof, replacing the windows, modernising the heating and overhauling the ventilation and the condensation drainage; a passage through to the Dutch Garden was also reinstated.

The Great Glasshouse, the cold house, is 80 m long and 15 m wide. Its roof rests on trusses of bent timber. The works renewed its windows, heating and floors, repaired the ceiling decoration and brought back an illusionistic ceiling painting. A low production greenhouse of steel and glass was added in the 1970s on the site of the former pheasantry.

The Palm House was built to grow the palm collection all year round; since its restoration it has housed a permanent plant display and serves as the gateway to the restored Dutch Garden. The Great Glasshouse was used to overwinter the plants that stood in the garden during the warm months and, from the 19th century onwards, as a setting for cultural and social gatherings.

The palace camellias are famous for their age and size: some reach five metres in height, and their cultivation in Kroměříž goes back roughly a century and a half. According to Czech public radio, only the collection of the Liberec Botanical Garden compares with them in the country. Their late-winter flowering is the occasion for exhibitions such as 'Kamélie dell'arte' in February 2018, which paired the flowers with commedia dell'arte and also showed a Wollemi pine, a conifer discovered in Australia in 1994. The production greenhouse once raised tens of thousands of seedlings a year for the Květná zahrada, the Palace Garden (Podzámecká zahrada) and the decoration of the palace rooms.

The glasshouses form the main entrance to the garden, on Generála Svobody street. Visitors pass through them on arrival before reaching the parterres, the mazes, the octagonal rotunda and the 244-metre colonnade lined with 44 statues and 44 busts; the garden covers a rectangle of about 485 by 300 metres, and two hours are enough to go round it. Late winter, when the camellias are in flower, is the most rewarding season for the glasshouses; in summer the Great Glasshouse holds a café. The visit pairs well with the archbishop's palace, listed together with the garden, and with its park, the Podzámecká zahrada.