Łódź Palm House

The Łódź palm house grew out of private collections. In the late nineteenth century the city's textile magnates and the officials of the tsarist administration filled their winter gardens and orangeries with exotic plants; the Scheibler and Herbst families, among others, showed specimens at the 1892 horticultural exhibition. In 1914, as Russian officials fled ahead of the German advance, part of these collections passed to the municipality and joined its greenhouses.

In 1925 the municipal plantations department moved the collection, by then outgrowing its quarters, into a building in Źródliska I park: a former canteen for the unemployed put up in 1914. The building was raised and adapted from 1955, and the palm house opened to the public on 1 September 1956. It was placed under the Łódź Botanical Garden in 1959 for proper scientific care and was raised again in 1970, when its upper section was glazed.

On 14 June 1995 the city council decided to modernise the building where it stood rather than move it, since the roots of the oldest palms made relocation too risky. The works, carried out between 1999 and 2003, renewed the glazed structure and introduced an unusual heating system; a stream and a café were added at the same time. The palm house marked its seventieth anniversary in September 2026.

The present building is the outcome of successive transformations of a 1914 structure rather than a purpose-built conservatory. Since the 1999–2003 renovation it has offered about 1,100 m² of display space in three pavilions, each with its own climate. According to a detailed account published in 2016, the pavilion of hard-leaved (Mediterranean) vegetation covers 588 m² and rises to 16 metres; the equatorial and subtropical pavilion covers 422 m² and reaches 22 metres; and the desert and semi-desert section takes up about 100 m².

The renovation's technical signature is an integrated heating façade: aluminium-framed glazing panels carry the hot-water pipes, so that the walls themselves radiate warmth and no radiators are needed.

The oldest plants are an Araucaria bidwillii and palms inherited from the nineteenth-century collections, put at 130 to 150 years old and standing around 18 metres tall: date palms, Canary Island date palms, Howea forsteriana, Areca baueri and Chinese windmill palms (Trachycarpus fortunei). The Mediterranean pavilion also holds citrus, laurels, gardenias, myrtles and bananas; the tropical pavilion, orchids, bromeliads, ferns, philodendrons, monsteras and epiphytes; the desert section, cacti and succulents, including aloes more than four metres tall.

The collection is put at about 4,500 plants in recent descriptions, and as many as 9,000 specimens from nearly 2,000 taxa in an inventory cited in 2016, with large groups of orchids and cacti, many of them CITES-listed species.

The palm house stands in Źródliska I park, at 61 Piłsudski Avenue in central Łódź; it belongs to the municipal Botanical Garden, whose main grounds lie elsewhere in the city. The route runs through the three pavilions, from Mediterranean to tropical to desert plants; an hour to an hour and a half is a typical visit. The café set among the Mediterranean plants makes a natural pause. Outside, a teaching garden with ginkgos, sequoias, dawn redwoods, dove trees and oaks more than three centuries old extends the visit in the warmer months.