Preservation and Increasing Attractivity of Ancient Trees as Hidden Treasures in Historic Gardens Towards Green Tourism

Strategic aim of WISE TREES project is to establish the long-term cooperation of historic and botanic gardens (HBGs) operating in the Slovakian-Hungarian border area in order to improve garden-tourism which could have a decisive role in the region, where more than 60 gardens have been opened for the public. The main target of our project are ancient trees living in these public gardens. Hungarian Association of Botanic Gardens and Arboreta and National Trust of Slovakia cooperate in establishing new services which support gardens in preserving, examining, healing and interpreting ancient trees and citizens living in or coming to the region as tourists to visit and learn about wise trees and gardens they live in for more than 120 years. For that aim Beneficiaries, who have been supporting appr. 110 gardens nationwide for more than 20 years, need capacity development. We purchase special equipment for precise measuring and examining health condition of trees and for general trainings, which services we want to introduce for HBGs first of all. After a big data collection, 80 wise trees will be examined, 10 of them will be rehabilitated with the involvement of arborists but according to special dendrological knowledge and dendrophile concept of Beneficiaries. We would like to celebrate the renewal of at least 2 trees together with local citizens and tree lovers and show some more gardens to tourism professionals and journalists to motivate them to promote these attractions. Visitors can enjoy the exciting history of these 10 trees with the newly developed Audioguide App. The big database and short videos will give the background to the dynamic webpage where people can plan their visits to one of the 100 chosen wonderful trees according to their personal preferences. We would like to help garden maintainers in correct management of ancient trees so we invite them to participate at our new ancient tree management training.