Tropical greenhouses of the Malešice botanical garden (SOŠ Jarov)

The Malešice botanical garden grew out of a villa and its park. The neo-Renaissance villa, built at the end of the 19th century according to Živa, later belonged to an industrialist named Jirásek (sometimes written Jirásko), who had a landscape park laid out around 1920 on the south-western slope of Tábor hill. The garden architect František Thomayer is often linked to the park, but both the journal Živa and the school's website note that no document confirms it. At the same time, terraced glasshouses climbed the slope on the western side of the plot, with an orangery and a large domed palm house between them and the villa. Plants from Stromovka that had survived the 1891 Jubilee Exhibition were moved there, among them bromeliads and palms, including a Washingtonia robusta now more than a century old.

After the war the villa, occupied by the Wehrmacht, was expropriated and handed to Prague's first horticultural school, founded in 1909; the move dates from 1947 according to the school and from 1948 according to Czech Wikipedia. Botanical-garden status came in the early 1990s (1991, the school says), and in 2005 the garden became a founding member of the Union of Botanical Gardens of the Czech Republic.

The greenhouses on the slope, undermined by a landslide, corroded framing and leaks, are described by the school as in poor condition. A new building received the collections. Pupils and their instructors built rails and a shelter mounted on a chassis to protect the large palm from frost. The school now speaks of reusing the terraces of the old greenhouses and rebuilding the orangery.

The present building stands in the south-eastern part of the garden. Its entire frame is hot-dip galvanised steel, complemented by aluminium elements. According to the school, the glazing is double glazing on the sides and polycarbonate on the roof, so the structure combines glass and plastic. Inside, it is divided into eleven sections whose climate is controlled separately, to a precision of a quarter of an hour. The school describes ventilation through independently operated windows, automatically controlled district heating, semi-automatic irrigation (flooding, misting and sprinkling) and a thermal screen. The school's map gives 2,000 m² of greenhouses, without saying whether the figure refers to this building alone. Part of the space is devoted to teaching (houseplants and tropical plants), another part to collection plants and commercial crops; according to Czech Wikipedia, the building also houses a plant sales point.

The historic glasshouses were of another kind: terraced houses, an orangery and a domed palm house. Wikidata describes these old greenhouses as largely demolished, and Commons holds images of their remains, among them a flight of steps. The large palm received its own shelter: a small greenhouse mounted on a chassis and on rails, built by pupils and their instructors.

The school and local press describe extensive collections of orchids, cacti, bromeliads and ferns, together with palms several decades old. Czech Wikipedia adds tillandsias and gives 5,200 as the number of taxa grown across the whole garden in 2023, park and outdoor plants included. The photographs in the Živa article on the garden show a small epiphytic orchid, Cirrhopetalum sikkimense, and the cactus Echinocactus grusonii; at the 2020 anniversary, a dragon built on Vriesea plants passed through a greenhouse wall.

The centrepiece is the Washingtonia robusta, more than a century old and six metres tall. According to local press, it would be the largest and oldest of its species in the Czech Republic. Grown too tall for a school greenhouse, it spends the winter under the rolling shelter, which is moved aside in summer. Other palms are carried out in front of the villa and the greenhouse in the warm season.

Separately, the school raises in its production greenhouses thousands of annual, biennial and balcony-plant seedlings, then poinsettias and primroses according to the season.

The greenhouses stand in the south-east of the garden, on Pod Táborem street in Prague 9. Entry to the garden is free. Outside the summer season, access to the garden is limited to school days, since this is a teaching site, so the school's website is worth checking before a visit. The greenhouses take about an hour; the park invites a longer walk past the neo-Renaissance villa, the pond on the Malá Rokytka stream, the gazebo, the bridge with Art Deco elements, the arboretum and the rock garden with its waterfall. The view is fullest in summer, when the palms are outdoors and the Washingtonia's shelter has been rolled away.

According to Czech Wikipedia, the building houses a sales point for plants grown by the school.