In the Collection, we grow more than 700 of plant species – the majority originate from the Czech Republic, or Central Europe, only little less than 10 % of the species come from other areas of the world. Such an amount of species makes our Collection one of the largest in Europe. The collection also contains rescue cultivations of more than 30 endangered species used to strengthen the wildlife populations. The Collection is open to public from spring through autumn. The Collection was established in 1976 to study endangered species. The Collection also serves as a gene pool for rare and endangered plant species. It provides domestic and foreign research institutions with study and experimental material, and material for identification and botanical illustrations, and it is used for botany and plant ecology courses. Since 1998, 150-200 species of seeds have been regularly collected and offered to research institutions and botanical gardens.
The Collection contains flowering and sporogenous plants, as well as charophyceae. It includes all ecological forms of aquatic and wetland plants: species that grow in water with or without roots, plants with leaves floating on the surface, free-floating plants and emergent plants, perennial and annual plants. It also includes common species as well as rare and critically endangered species that have almost disappeared from the Czech flora. We can find here plants of peat bogs, marshlands, reeds and sedge vegetation, and also plants of uncovered pond bottoms, wet sandy substrate, rivers and reservoirs. In the Collection, the plants are arranged by their ecological requirements. In deep reservoirs we grow aquatic plants, in shallow reservoirs there are various wetland plants. The reservoirs are divided by the trophic level, alkalinity of water, soil structure and shading. In the Collection, there is a vast number of plant species with different ecological requirements within a small area. Also, we grow all species of carnivorous plants of the Czech Republic here. It is supplemented with a collection of more than 60 species of (sub)tropical aquatic, marsh and carnivorous plants.