Zuschendorf Castle Glasshouses (Kamelienschloss)

Zuschendorf manor is first recorded in 1403 as a fief of the Carlowitz family. Occupied by the Red Army in 1945, it passed to the town of Pirna in 1946, suffered partial demolition from 1947 and then fell into decay. On 1 August 1988 the park passed to the VEG Saatzucht Zierpflanzen Dresden, which acquired the castle two months later and saved it from demolition; a support association was founded in 1991.

The plant collection comes from Dresden. According to Wikipedia, the court gardener Johann Heinrich Seidel was raising camellias from the winter of 1792/93; his garden held 4,300 plants in 1806, according to the Technical University of Dresden. His sons founded a specialist nursery in 1813: the estate's site cites 19 varieties in 1824, 1,100 in 1842 and a production of about 100,000 plants a year. The firm was expropriated in 1946; its collection, preserved in the East German period, was moved to Zuschendorf after 1989, when the liquidation of many nurseries threatened Saxony's heritage varieties. At the same time 1,300 m² of glasshouses were built, according to the collection's page. Listed as a monument in 1993, it belongs to the State of Saxony; according to the TU Dresden, it is the first plant collection in Germany protected in this way.

In March 2017 a new, terraced glasshouse was opened during the fourteenth German camellia blossom show; the group then numbered seven glasshouses. A glasshouse built around 1894 across the river by Xaver von Lentz, then the owner, for citrus trees and a rose, survives in very poor condition.

The Zuschendorf glasshouses form a group rather than a single building, spread through the park about a hundred metres north of the castle according to OpenStreetMap. Figures vary from page to page: the estate's site announces more than 1,800 m² of glasshouses, the TU Dresden and the 2026 poster speak of 1,500 m² of glazed display area ('Schauglasfläche'), and another page of the collection mentions 1,300 m² built when the varieties were brought together. The university counted seven houses in 2017.

The new 2017 house is laid out in terraces, which for the first time lets visitors look down on the plants. Free photographs on Wikimedia Commons show long glasshouses with sloping glazed roofs carried on timber posts, with a white door of small panes; inside, standard camellias grow in terracotta pots along flagged paths, under glass and in front of ivy-covered walls. The estate's pages say the camellias are grown as globes, as bonsai and as espaliers. Above the glasshouses the slope carries 360 hydrangea varieties planted out in the ground.

Each year, from March, about 220 camellia varieties and species are shown under glass. The historic collection comprises about a hundred old varieties, supplemented by recent cultivars and wild species, among them a yellow camellia, Camellia nitidissima. Its core is the Saxon collection known as the Seidel collection, reduced from 1,100 varieties in the nineteenth century to 76 proven varieties. The estate cites historic cultivars with a date: 'Alba Plena' and 'Variegata' (1792), 'Althaeiflora' and 'Lady Campbell' (1824), 'Tricolor' (1832), 'Frau Minna Seidel' (1883). 'Chandlers Elegans' (1831) is presented as the main variety of present-day camellia growing. The oldest plants are five from the Herrmann nursery at Doberlug-Kirchhain; the oldest, a 'Chandlers Elegans', dates from 1885.

The estate also holds a collection of 360 historic azaleas, which according to the 2026 poster comes from the former Royal Court Nursery at Pillnitz, together with rhododendrons, hydrangeas (about 500 varieties according to the poster, 480 according to the collection's page), bonsai and a fruit-tree orangery. According to the estate's pages, azaleas, rhododendrons and hydrangeas belong to the Deutsche Genbank Zierpflanzen.

Park, glasshouses and castle are open from March to early October, Tuesday to Sunday; from early October to the end of February the collections are closed. The camellia show runs from late February to mid-April, with the main flowering expected at the end of March; in 2026 two cut-flower shows are also held in the castle's rooms. Next come the azalea show (late April), the bonsai and fruit-tree orangeries (May to early October) and, from mid-July to mid-August, the hydrangeas flowering in the park.

Bus lines Z, 205 and 207a serve the 'Zuschendorf Am Landschloss' stop, two minutes on foot away. In Pirna the Terrassengärten and the StadtMuseum are close, and the Pillnitz Kamelienhaus, already in the catalogue, lies about 9 km away. Allow a good half-day with the park and the castle.