12. Slatinka
Bára Lungová
This garden in Slatina/Slatinka is located just next to the railway tracks by two signal houses. The railway worker who created the garden was originally a schooled gardener with several years of practice who later in his career changed jobs and started working with the railway company. His gardens have been the result of continuous everyday thinking, planning, and manual work, which he has been carrying out for about a quarter of century. Mr. Š. created the garden primarily for an aesthetic purpose - he looked at it constantly during his daily routine as a signaler. However, he does not want to keep the pleasure just to himself, and he often thinks of the passengers on the train or the bikers passing some of the flower beds that lie next to the bike path from Slatina to Šlapanice. The railway garden contains plants which require high soil quality – daffodils, tulips, strawberries, cucumbers, onions, or tomatoes. Since the only thing that was there originally was concrete debris, Mr. Š. had to dig out the beds, line the holes with chicken wire (as protection against moles, which were his nightmares), and fill them with high-quality compost and mulch, which he had made from poplar leaves he brought on a wheelbarrow from a distance of more than a hundred meters. The individual beds are composed in a grid pattern. The beds that Mr. Š. built next to the cycling lane are surrounded by colored gravel which he periodically weeds chemically. The aesthetic aspect of the beds is a very serious matter for Mr. Š. He aims at combining the colors of the flowers and the other used materials in what he sees as the most spectacular way possible.
