1. Vídeňská/the Albert supermarket
Bára Lungová
This location represents evidence of new spontaneous plantings of fruit trees in the vicinity of Vídeňská and Reneská streets. The immediate surroundings of and around the Hluboká tram stops are interesting due to the existence of historical plantings of solitary fruit trees, which may be dated back to the first postwar decades when the small housing estate was built nearby, or maybe even to slightly earlier times when this was an agricultural and industrial landscape. Generally, fruit trees are absent from public space in cities – both in this country and in Western Europe. Nevertheless, I still have fond memories of times in my young age of growing up in a small South-Moravian town where many streets were lined by alleys of pear or cherry trees in the 1980s and 1990s. (House construction and plantings occurred simultaneously in those streets in the 19
Within the Czech Republic, policies concerning the planting of fruit trees in open public space vary widely. While some cities actually encourage volunteer citizen gardeners to plant fruit shrubs and trees in open public space according to the so-called “greenery adoption schemes,” other cities either actively ban such trees (within their greenery adoption schemes), or they themselves avoid choosing edible taxons in openly accessible public greenery. The typical arguments they present include more demanding care (pruning, the cleanup of rotting fruit), or hygiene (fruit might get spoiled by dogs, other people, etc.).
Some of the possible spontaneous interventions reacting to this taxonomic lacuna can be seen in the activities of a loose international collective of “Guerilla Grafters,” who graft fruit trees onto decorative ones.
The young trees featured in the audioguide were apparently planted in a rush, with a minimum effort of soil preparation and minimum financing (no protection against damage; the tree size indicates a possible domestic origin). Well, let’s keep our fingers crossed for them.
20s and 1930s.)