Glasshouses of the Comenius University Botanical Garden (Botanická záhrada UK)

The Comenius University Botanical Garden was founded in 1942. Its creation was entrusted to Professor František Nábělek, head of the university's botanical institute, while the plans are credited to František Jirásek. The chosen site, 6.6 hectares around the small Lafranconi villa in Karlova Ves, offered a permanent water supply, with the Vydrica stream crossing the grounds, and a location convenient for residents and students alike.

The glasshouses were only built after the Second World War, together with an irrigation network, and nearly 3,000 species were then brought into cultivation. The garden later took on more of the character of a park open to the wider public, gaining a limestone ravine, an andesite rock garden and a new rose garden. By the late 1970s it grew around 5,000 species, and in the 1980s the construction of the Lafranconi Bridge took away part of the grounds.

The garden remains a scientific and teaching unit of the university, attached to its rectorate. It maintains and enlarges its living collections, supports teaching in specialised schools, informs the public and runs acclimatisation trials, whose best-adapted trees go on to landscaping and forestry.

Rather than a single great glass palace, the garden lines up a group of display glasshouses, each devoted to one group of plants and linked to the others by corridors. The useful-plants house focuses on tropical and subtropical crops; another is given over to Australian flora; the Victoria house holds tropical and subtropical plants that need heat and humidity; the palm house also shelters araucarias and cycads; and the cactus house presents cacti and other succulents.

The connecting corridors are more than passages: they serve as display spaces in their own right for figs, ferns, orchids, bromeliads and tillandsias, so that a visit forms a continuous circuit from one climate to the next. According to the university, these houses of warmth-loving flora are the part of the garden that draws most public interest.

Under glass, the collections cover useful plants of the tropics and subtropics, Australian flora, palms, araucarias and cycads, cacti and succulents and, in the Victoria house, the vegetation of hot, humid tropical habitats; the corridors display figs, ferns, orchids, bromeliads and tillandsias.

Outdoors, the rose garden gathers 120 species of roses, and seven rock gardens each showcase a different stone: andesite, limestone, travertine, scoria, shale, basalt and granite. There are also a peat bog, beds of annuals and perennials, a collection of exotic and native trees, rhododendrons and azaleas, frost-hardy cacti, Mediterranean vegetation and a Japanese garden. Themed shows punctuate the season: rock plants in early May, cacti in June and again in September, and autumn fruits in September (2026 programme).

The garden lies in Karlova Ves on Botanická street, served by the "Botanická záhrada" tram stop (lines 4 and 9). It follows the seasons: open from April to the end of October and closed in winter, with the glasshouses open over the same period as the outdoor garden. The route takes in the glasshouses and their linking corridors before the rock gardens, the rose garden and the Japanese garden.

In summer, free concerts organised with the Karlova Ves borough and a guided botanical walk bring the grounds to life, while the rock-plant and cactus shows in spring and September draw enthusiasts.