Palm Greenhouse in the Lány Château Park (palmový skleník)

In 1875 the Fürstenbergs, owners of the Lány estate, bought three private farmsteads along what is now Zámecká Street. On this land they laid out a palm house and a vegetable garden in 1879-1881, following a fashion common among the great aristocratic residences of the day. The design was entrusted to Jan B. Urban, and workers at the princely ironworks in Stará Huť made the metal frame.

In 1921 the Czechoslovak state bought the estate from the Fürstenbergs and the château became the president's summer residence. The greenhouse was then due to be demolished, but Tomáš Garrigue Masaryk and his architect Jože Plečnik, who was adapting the estate, recognised its worth. Plečnik kept it and enlarged it; the winter garden and the new wing were finished in 1923. According to the daily Deník, the building escaped demolition a second time in 1985.

Neglected and overgrown, the greenhouse underwent a full restoration in 2013-2015 under the Prague Castle Administration, which manages the estate. Deník put the cost at 23 million crowns. The aim was to recover the state Plečnik had given it while keeping the original iron structure, some 130 years old according to the Administration's director, Ivo Velíšek. President Miloš Zeman inaugurated the restored greenhouse in March 2016 and opened it to the public together with the park.

The 1879-1881 greenhouse combines an iron frame, forged in the Fürstenberg works at Stará Huť, with decorative cast-iron elements supplied by Albert Milde, a Viennese court locksmith and sought-after supplier of castings who was born in Vsetín. The glass panes came from the firm of the Prague merchant Franz Götze. The building thus brought together the estate's own ironworkers and specialist suppliers from Vienna and Prague.

Plečnik added to the original volume a perpendicular wing ending in a small service building used for maintenance work; the winter garden and this wing were completed in 1923. The original building was thus extended by a second volume set at right angles.

The 2013-2015 restoration kept the original metal frame. Beyond the historic structures, it also covered the heating, ventilation and electrical installation, and the whole was returned to the public with the park in 2016.

The sources consulted say little about the planting in detail. From the start, the ensemble paired a palm house, reserved for exotic plants in the taste of the time, with a kitchen garden laid out on the land of the farmsteads bought in 1875. Today the national tourism portal CzechTourism describes it as a restored palm house holding exotic plants, but no species list is published.

The greenhouse belongs to a landscape park of about 110 hectares known for its rare foreign trees, exotic plants and ornamental pond. The taste for plants from elsewhere goes back a long way here: as early as 1785, M. G. Stumpf laid out a small arboretum and a rose garden near the château, before an English-style park was created in 1852 under Prince Karl Egon II of Fürstenberg.

Lány Château lies at the edge of the Křivoklát forests, west of Prague; the greenhouse stands west of the main building. It can only be visited when the park is open, from March to October and on certain days only, through the main gate on Zámecká Street, so it is worth checking the calendar before setting out. The CzechTourism portal suggests allowing about an hour for the park. The walk also takes in Plečnik's other works, including the colonnaded wall on the pond dam with its columns bearing bronze lion heads.