Palmenhaus Schönbrunn (Great Palm House)

Schönbrunn's botanical garden dates from the mid-eighteenth century: in 1753 Emperor Francis I acquired land at Hietzing, where Adrian van Steckhoven and Richard van der Schot built a hothouse and glasshouses, and the "Dutch garden" was laid out from 1754. Enlarged under Joseph II among others, by the late nineteenth century it had become a jumble of buildings, several of them dilapidated. The court then wished, for the first time, to gather its entire collection in a single showpiece glasshouse.

In summer 1878 the court garden inspector Adolf Vetter and Franz Segenschmid of the court building office toured the new glass palaces of Germany, France and England, including the Palm House at Kew, which became the direct model. Contracts were signed from January 1880; Sigmund Wagner carried out the structural calculations and Ignaz Gridl delivered the ironwork from July 1880. On 17 June 1882 Franz Joseph visited the still-empty building, a visit later counted as the inauguration, and the plants were moved in over the summer.

On 19 February 1945, American bombs fell on the park: the palm house was not hit, but the blasts shattered almost all its glazing, and many plants froze despite being moved to the orangery. Repairs required 12,000 m² of glass and five railway wagons of putty, and the house reopened in January 1953. In 1976, after the collapse of Vienna's Reichsbrücke, it failed a structural inspection and closed. Restored in 1986-1990 and again in 2011-2014, it has been run since 1918 by the Austrian Federal Gardens (Bundesgärten).

At 111 metres long (113 according to the palace website), up to 28 metres wide and 25 metres high at the central pavilion, the Palmenhaus covers 2,500 m² of ground, against the 3,500 m² first planned. Its prefabricated parts combine some 600 tonnes of wrought iron and 120 tonnes of cast iron, and its 4,900 m² of glazing consist of about 45,000 panes.

The scheme follows Kew, but Segenschmid added square corner pavilions to the wings, echoing the forms of the central pavilion and linked to it by covered passages. The frame rests on a low stone parapet: the wrought-iron lattice girders stay outside, with the glass wall hung from them, while inside cast-iron columns carry the ring of beams. The overlapping, scale-like glazing, originally double, was replaced in 1986-1990 by insulating units in the original pane format, laid like shingles on curved aluminium glazing bars.

Three climates follow one another: a cool house to the north (minimum 6 °C), a temperate central pavilion (12 °C) and a tropical house to the south (18 °C). The original boiler house to the south held three coal-fired boilers whose steam also heated the nearby zoo and the reserve glasshouses; some twenty years later it was moved to the Maxingstraße. Rainwater cisterns, misting and underfloor heating now complete the equipment.

The layout of 1882 survives. The cool house was centred on a large Araucaria columnaris, surrounded by tree ferns, acacias, proteas, banksias, camellias, azaleas and bulbs; the temperate pavilion on a Livistona chinensis among palms, cycads and tree ferns; and the tropical house held the aroid collection assembled by the court garden director Heinrich Wilhelm Schott, along with tropical useful plants.

The Federal Gardens now speak of well over 5,000 tropical and subtropical plants. Highlights include a 200-year-old date palm in the central hall, a Wollemia in the cool house and, in the warm house, a Seychelles nut palm grown from a nut presented at the 1990 reopening. An olive tree of about 350 years, given by Spain at the 1974 Vienna garden show, and the "Mirna palm", planted in April 2008 to replace a Livistona chinensis of about 170 years, are among its famous specimens; the Victoria flowered in August 2001, for the first time in more than forty years.

Since 1883 an azalea and camellia show has been held every year from January to March, using plants from reserve glasshouses closed to the public.

The Palmenhaus stands in the western part of Schönbrunn Park, on the site of the former Dutch botanical garden; palace and gardens have been a UNESCO World Heritage Site since 1996. A visit runs through the three pavilions in sequence, from the coolest to the warmest.

Open all year, it hosts several temporary shows annually: azaleas and camellias from January to March, pumpkins in autumn (October-November in 2026). Combined tickets pair it with the Wüstenhaus, the desert house in the nearby Sonnenuhrhaus, and with Schönbrunn Zoo close by; guided group tours are available on request, and the old palm house of 1828 stands a short walk away.