The Lednice-Valtice area is part of an ancient settlement area. Since 1391, the administration of this area began under one owner as Johann VI, Prince of Liechtenstein already built a Renaissance residence in Lednice in the form of an Italian villa for he had chose this place as his residence. As the surroundings of Valtice Castle did not allow for a more extensive garden programme, a crystallization core was created in Lednice as early as the 16th century, around which garden works were gradually composed.
The first great expansion of the gardens of Lednice began under the reign of Karl Eusebius, Prince of Liechtenstein, but it was not until the reign of a pair of brothers – Aloys I, Prince of Liechtenstein, and Johann I Joseph, Prince of Liechtenstein — that they took their present form.
Aloys I, Prince of Liechtenstein, became a prince in 1781 and from the map of 1799 we find that despite his knowledge of so-called modern garden design he still followed the instructions of Karl Eusebius, Prince of Liechtenstein and the principles of the French garden, which he equipped with building landmarks in the spirit of the Anglo-Chinese garden – perhaps this form better suited the Masonic symbolism. While the vegetation component was still based on the principles of the French garden, landmarks inspired by the buildings in Kew Garden in London were built as points de vue of the vistas (the arched bridge over Dyje, the imitation ruins of the triumphal arch, the log cabin in the shape of a timber, the Gothic house, the ice cottages, the Baroque stables and riding stables, the fountains of Swan Lake, the Minaret). In the middle of the preserve Hvězda, he had the Temple of the Sun built. He also extended the garden programme to the left bank of the Zámecká Dyje.
However, the majority of Liechtenstein’s land was made up of forests, which at the end of the 18th century, in the developing industrial revolution, were not sufficient for the rapidly increasing consumption of wood. At that time, North American timber was already known to grow quickly and to provide good quality timber, and in 1802 a special expedition was sent to North America at the prince’s expense. The expedition was led by Joseph van der Schott (1770–1812), the head gardener of the botanical garden of the University of Vienna. During the four years of research, 130 crates and barrels of seeds and young plants arrived in Lednice via Plymouth and Hamburg. Nurseries were set up for them behind the Minaret, and as early as 1808 they began to be sold not only in the monarchy but throughout Europe.
When Aloys I, Prince of Liechtenstein died in 1805, his younger brother Johann I Joseph, Prince of Liechtenstein took over the work and all the princely gardens were radically transformed. Prince Jan I was an enthusiastic builder of castles and small buildings in the countryside and his culminating work is the landscaping of the Lednice-Valtice area and the Lednice Castle Park particularly to protect it from floods, which until the mid-20th century regularly inundated the floodplain of the river Dyje.
This was to be done by excavating a huge ornamental lake, and the material was to be used to raise the horizon of the surrounding land above the flood level and to create three islands. In the original plan, several new buildings were to be constructed and only the surroundings of the older buildings were to be modified, but a few changes were made during implementation. Lednice Park was gradually “cleansed” of the old buildings (the Gothic House, the artificial ruins of the Arc de Triomphe, the Temple of the Sun) and only the most valuable ones remained – the Chinese Pavilion (removed in 1892) and the Minaret. However, the motifs of the buildings did not disappear from the area, and instead of “little buildings” in the park, monumental and very convincing architectural landmarks were built throughout the landscape. Instead of the Gothic House, an artificial ruin of a Gothic castle (Janohrad, 1807-1810), instead of an imitation of the ruins of the triumphal arch, the Rendezvous triumphal arch (1810-1812) and the Colonnade on the Reisten (1811-1817), etc. The Anglo-Chinese Garden programme thus affected more than 200 km2 of the surrounding landscape instead of 200 hectares of castle park. The two-phase application of the principles of the Anglo-Chinese Garden (Phase 1 on the scale of a castle garden, Phase 2 on the scale of a large landscape) was one of the reasons why the Lednice-Valtice area was inscribed on the UNESCO World Heritage List in 1996.
In 1836, Johann I Joseph, Prince of Liechtenstein died. The Lednice-Valtice area, known as the Garden of Europe, was even more famous then than in the 17th century, and after the construction of the railway from Vienna to Brno, it became the destination of many trips from both Vienna and Brno.
The end of the so-called long century brought the last wave of garden creation. Johann II, Prince of Liechtenstein decided to further expand the castle gardens. He bought 40 houses and had them demolished between 1873 and 1887. The area freed up allowed for the creation of a generous regular garden with collection bosquets and broderies, a new painting and landscaping lot was created to the east of this regular garden, in the spirit of the Lednice tradition, richly planted with conifers, especially from the western half of North America, alpinum was planted further east and greenhouses and steam rooms continued beyond. The new kitchen garden, enclosed by a wall around its entire perimeter, was situated next to the canal draining the Rose Pond. On the banks of the pond, planting of the then fashionable varieties of trees purchased from garden shops, exhibitions and fairs continued. An exception was the silver spruce trees in front of the greenhouse, which were personally brought by the chief gardener and court councillor, Wilhelm Lauche, dr. h. c., supposedly from America. At the same time as the new garden was being built, the old park was being “wilded”, which was then called Wildpark or Naturpark. The Chinese pavilion, the wharf and several bridges were removed.
Thus, before the First World War, Lednice had a garden that did not lack any of the mandatory parts of a Victorian garden (collections of plants and trees, flower beds, a kitchen garden with greenhouses and steam rooms, an alpinum and a wild park). The garden’s distinctive verdant character was given by the massive planting of conifers and evergreens.
Author: Ing. Zdeněk Novák, National Museum of Agriculture, general director
Lecture Preview: 13 October 2025 | 5:00 PM | National Museum of Agriculture