Ogród Botaniczny, Wrocław

Ogród Botaniczny is Wrocław University’s botanical garden, laid out in eighteen eleven. Its ground combines part of Ostrów Tumski with land released after Napoleon’s forces ordered the city defences torn down. The pond is an extraordinary survivor: it occupies the course of a northern arm of the Odra that was filled in.

Let your gaze travel across the water and planting; this garden is Poland’s oldest of its kind after Kraków’s. Near the pond’s western end grows the Oak of Friendship, planted in eighteen eleven, alongside venerable yews and plane trees. By the end of eighteen sixteen, the collections already held roughly five hundred outdoor species and about fifteen hundred greenhouse plants.

During the siege of Festung Breslau in nineteen forty-five, the greenhouse collection vanished and half the garden’s trees were lost; later dredging of the pond uncovered a substantial wartime cache of weapons. In nineteen fifty-eight, engineers cleared the pond and built the arched wooden footbridge that became a garden emblem. The grounds now cover seven point four hectares and hold about seven thousand five hundred plant species, with many more cultivated forms. The garden has held heritage protection since nineteen seventy-four.