Unique garden at Pernštejn is finished, will open in May

Nedvědice - After 33 months of work, which were not halted even by the winter months, the Manor Garden of the Gothic Pernštejn Castle in the Brno region is completed. The completion was about a month behind schedule due to the coronavirus pandemic, said castle custodian Zdeněk Škrabal to ČTK.

The project's costs of 125 million crowns were partially covered by a grant from European funds. The garden, which is absolutely unique in the Czech Republic particularly because of its location on a steep hill and next to the castle, will open to the public in May of next year.

"The garden is officially completed and the castle management has taken over, but some areas are still not completely green, they need time. We don’t want to present the garden to people for the first time without leaves, but rather in full bloom, hence the May date,” explained Škrabal.

During the garden's restoration, it was necessary to cut down a large number of mature trees, leaving stumps in the terrain. "Many of them were already dangerous and would have needed to be felled even if the garden was not being restored. The castle stands on a rock, and in these places, it is covered by only about a meter of soil. Overgrown trees thus toppled under their own weight, and if they fell, they created a crater in the slope as if from an explosion,” stated the custodian.

On the steep slope, hundreds of trees were cut down, but the gardeners planted another five hundred shrubs. On the slope, the focus is on native species that previously grew there, such as beech, hornbeam, or linden trees, while the flat part designed as a French-style garden contains fruit trees.

The individual parts of the garden differ significantly from one another, as if it were a sample of garden styles. "The oldest part of the garden forms a kind of baroque axis, which is followed by a garden of French layout with fruit trees. A hedge made of hornbeams, which will grow to about two meters high, will separate it from the Anglo-Chinese garden. In the slope, east of the baroque axis, there is a romantic part with viewing terraces and an obelisk, followed by a separate forest part with rocky areas and rubble fields,” described Škrabal.

In both the slope and the flat part of the garden, there are scattered so-called salets, small constructions. These include a niche with a statue of Apollo, a Chinese pavilion, or a hermitage, which had to be reconstructed during the restoration. "During the archaeological survey, we found that there used to be a mechanical wooden hermit there. We found remnants of a mechanism that worked in such a way that when someone stepped onto the threshold of the hermitage, it activated a wooden figure of the hermit who blessed the visitor and then returned to its rest," said the custodian.

All the statues in the restored garden are sculptural copies; the originals are stored in the castle. The Manor Garden will serve as a separate tour route after its opening, from which visitors can enter from the castle and either walk through the garden loop and return back to the castle, or exit in the lower part of the garden through a newly built turnstile to the parking lot.

Three gardeners will take care of the extensive garden, their employment was part of the project. Together with the Manor Garden, they will also care for the forest park, which covers most of the hill on which the castle stands.