Jezeřské arboretum Park

The Jezeřské arboretum, formerly also known as the Eisenberg Park, was a very extensive English park located between the Jezeří Castle and the now-disappeared settlement of Albrechtice in the Mostecko region. It contained several thousand trees, many of which were of exotic origin or unusual age.

The park began to develop at the end of the seventeenth century on the slope of Zámecký vrch and gradually expanded toward Albrechtice. In the year eighteen twenty-three, a central ornamental garden covering five hectares was created. Over the next fifteen years, the entire park expanded to fifty hectares. It adjoined a game reserve and to a large extent had a natural character, which was emphasized by a trio of ponds lined with linden and oak trees. The central part, by contrast, was designed in the French style, with hedgerows, small pools, greenhouses, and aviaries.

Trees were planted both native and non-native, always according to the nature of the location. There were oaks, beeches including red-leaved varieties, linden trees, pines, larches, Canadian fir, silver blue spruce, Turkish hazel, horse chestnuts, plane trees, and magnolias.

The fate of the park was sealed by the neighboring brown coal mine. In the year nineteen seventy-eight, the mining company requested the removal of protection from the lower part of the park. An inventory then counted forty-nine hundred and ten trees on thirty-three hectares. Their value was estimated at more than three hundred and seventy-eight million crowns, with the entire park valued at half a billion. However, the historical and ecological value could not be calculated. In the nineteen-eighties, mining destroyed the lower part.

Some rare specimens were successfully saved. A three-hundred-year-old lilac, older than the beginning of lilac cultivation in our country, was excavated in nineteen eighty-four and transported to the castle park in Krásný Dvůr. A year later, old magnolias were also taken there. Much more demanding was the transplanting of a roughly one-hundred-year-old coast redwood, standing nineteen point one meters high and weighing fifteen tons. According to the information available at the time, no one in the world had ever attempted such a thing before. The actual transplanting began on March eleventh, nineteen eighty-seven and was complicated by frozen soil, roots of unequal length, and soft bark prone to damage. One of the possible new locations considered was the recreational area of Benedikt near Most.

The Albrechtický Oak, called the Albrechtický grandfather, one of the oldest and mightiest oaks in the country, was less fortunate. It was destroyed after repeated arson, allegedly because it was in the way of mining operations.

The upper part of the park was also supposed to be mined. It was saved only by a campaign in nineteen ninety-one. However, without care, it became overgrown with self-sown vegetation, and today the last remains are scarcely visible along the road from Černice to the castle. On November twenty-third, twenty twenty-two, the preserved part of the arboretum, together with Jezeří Castle, was declared a national cultural monument.