Floriculture in Poland: research, education and production

It is a special privilage for me to welcome you at the opening session and to give you a short survey of the present state of research, education and ornamental plants production of our Polish floriculture. Here in our Institute of Pomology and Floriculture in Skierniewice, in the centre of Europe, 40 research workers are involved in the floriculture programme and employed in the Departments of Plant Production, Nursery, Breeding, Plant Protection, Postharvest, Seed Production, In Vitro Laboratory, Physiology, Mechanization and Economy. There is no time to go into details what happend in each Department; you will visit our Floriculture Section, we will talk with you all the time and I am sure, that the personal talks are always the best way to make good contacts and to exchange informations. There are 6 Agricultural Universities in Poland (figure 1), where education of students is the main aim and research with ornamental plants is done in a smaller range. First to be mentioned is the Agriculture University in Warszawa - our oldest Cathedral of Floriculture (56 years old) and where Professor Henryk Chmiel holds now the chair. The second one is in Poznan and is now guided by Professor Mieczyslaw Czekalski. The next is in Kraków, conducted by Dr Zbigniew Pindel. Then we have Lublin chaired by Professor Jerzy Hetman and Bydgoszcz leaded by Professor Marek Jerzy and the youngest one Department of Floriculture in Szczecin which is in the stage of organization. Every year about 200 students graduate from these Universities, obtaining degrees of MSc in Horticulture with the majority in floriculture or ornamental nursery production. Moreover research connected with floriculture is being done in the Botanical Gardens in Warszawa and Wroclaw, in the Polish Academy of Science, in the Horticulture Seed Association and in the Research Centre of Cultivars. We do have representives from each University and from other floriculture research centres here and I am sure you will have the opportunity to talk with them. Many representatives from our Universities took care of poster presentation; we had no space for all to present papers so we gave the priority to oral presentation to our guests. The greenhouse area in the last 20 years changed very rapidly in our country and the figures for the total area and floriculture is given in table 1. In the last 20 years the total area increased over thousand ha and for floriculture over 400 ha. I am sorry I cannot give you the exact area of greenhouses we do have on this moment because our whole Polish economy is in a phase of transformation. Big state horticultural enterprises are or will be subjected to privatisation, some of them switch to other types of activity and some firms even go bankrupt, so the statistical data in the last two years are based on estimations. About 75% of our ornamental plants are produced under cover, including 200 ha of heated plastic tunnels, consists of cut flowers. Traditional we buy flowers - predominant cut flowers - to celebrate namedays. Birthdays are only celebrated in the small family circle and about 40% of all flowers are being bougth for namedays.