The Hungarian Garden Heritage Foundation, in collaboration with NÖF National Heritage Protection and Development Non-profit Ltd., contributes to the conservation of a herbarium collection, specialised library and gene bank of outstanding value even at European level. The technical condition of the building that has hitherto hosted the collection in Budakeszi, created and financed by the International Dendrological Foundation, have seriously deteriorated. Thanks to the generous offer of NÖF Non-profit Ltd., this unique collection will find new home in the Amadé–Bajzáth–Pappenheim Palace and Garden in Iszkaszentgyörgy. The relocation will be done with the collaboration of horticulture and landscape architecture professionals.
The International Dendrological Foundation grew out of the work team of the Dendrological Documentation Project of the (Hungarian) Natural History Museum within the framework of an American scholarship in 1995. Building on successful expeditions, colleagues at the Foundation vowed to familiarise with the world’s temperate woody plants as much as possible, to preserve specimens collected during expeditions and their background documentation, and to disseminate the knowledge of natural sciences through their specialised and educational materials. With almost 250,000 specimens and nearly 89,000 different sample collections conducted, they have created the 52nd largest collection in Europe. The collection ranks even higher when placing the mere number of documented woody plants into international context. The goal is to integrate the comparative documentation of every tree species within our climatic zone in order to support domestic science and education. Together with trustee István Rácz, Dr. Zsolt Debreczy, who is at the forefront of international dendrological research, and his team conducted research, explored and strived to salvage anything of value throughout the entire Temperate Zone in the past nearly half a century. Over the course of their work, they have discovered a number of new tree species and published numerous books. Other achievements of their work include hundreds of thousands of analogue and digital photographs, a dendrological specialised library of more than three thousand volumes, and an extensive, well-documented, genetic reserve collection of live plants, a result of regular collector work exploring the Temperate and Cold Zones of the Earth. Relocation has become necessary due to the deterioration of the technical conditions of the 650 m2 building in Budakeszi housing the foundation and the lack of resources needed for renovation in order to conserve the accumulated intellectual capital and irreplacable documentation, and to make use of the intellectual assets. As proposed by NÖF National Heritage Protection and Development Non-profit Ltd., the collections and documentation centre of the International Dendrological Foundation is set to move into one of the wings of the Amadé–Bajzáth–Pappenheim Palace in Iszkaszentgyörgy with the coordination of the Hungarian Garden Heritage Foundation. A comprehensive, joint effort of horticulture and landscape architecture professionals will support the relocation. The cooperation agreement of these three organisations aims to conserve and make the library and the collection known to the public as much as possible. The scientific material and live collection of the Foundation can play an important role particularly in the present climatic conditions and contribute to the domestic dendrological cultivation of plants with renewed force in the future.
