A Lovely Place in Wrocław - The Botanical Garden

Just some pretty flowers and trees today. I took the photos in the Botanical Garden in Wrocław in spring.

Entering the Botanical Garden Wrocław
The Botanical Garden in Wrocław, situated on the Cathedral Island, is a lovely and quiet place. It was around lunch time when I came by the entrance and decided the garden might offer a nice spot to sit and have a sandwich. Turned out it was the right decision.

The cutoff lake
I walked around for a while and then found a bank near the lake to have a little lunch break, surrounded by the fresh green of spring, budding trees and flowers, and the song of birds.

Spring blossoms
The garden has a large section with Japanese plants, including magnolias. It was the time of the magnolia bloom, so there was an abundance of the white, pink and pale lilac blossoms, and loose petals gently drifting in the warm spring breeze.

The stars of spring: Magnolias
The Botanical Garden in Wrocław was established in 1811. Originally, it encompassed 5 ha along a cutoff lake of the river Oder which runs through Wrocław - the site of the old fortifications of the Cathredal Island which had been razed. The garden was expanded already a few years later; the last addition took place in 1933.

Blooming magnolias, closeup
The Botanical Garden was founded together with the University of Wrocław and has always been a part of it; today as a separate institute of the Faculty of Biological Sciences. The garden is not only a place of recreation and the occasional festival (like the Magnolia Finals), but also serves for research.

More magnolias
The garden started out with some 400 seeds and seedlings, but already in 1816, there had been about two thousand plants. Today, the garden surface covers 7.5 hectares, and the number of plants is at 7.5 thousand plant species (11.5 thousand plant variants).

Stone garden with basalt pillars (left)
Those include mountain, rock, water, marsh, tropical and subtropical plants. It's the sort of place you could visit every month and always discover new beauties.

Ground cover plants in the Alpine section
Unfortunately, the only detailed website about the flora of the garden is in Polish, so I could not find names for all the pretties I photographed. Well, they're lovely even without the correct botanical names.

A Japanese variant of rhododendron
The Botanical Garden was severely damaged during WW2. The greenhouses were completely destroyed, as well as about 50% of the plants. A flak artillery had been stationed in the park during the last months of the war.

Japanese chaenomeles
The reconstruction of the Botanical Garden lasted until the end of the 1950ies. The timber bridge across the oxbow lake was added at the time, together with some other buildings.

The oxbow lake, from a different angle
Since 1974, the Botanical Garden is under monumental protection; and part of the Historical Heritage of Wrocław since 1991, together with the adjacent cathedral.

View to the Cathedral Island from the other side of the Oder river
Writing this post reminded me that we got a botanical garden here, too. I should snatch my camera and take some nice autumn pics there on the next sunny afternoon.