The Hungarian secular ornamental garden culture can be spoken of from the 14th to the 15th century. The nobility followed the example of the magnificent royal gardens. In Hungary, the establishment and flourishing of Renaissance garden culture is linked to the name of King Matthias. These were already large-scale palace gardens and wildlife parks, preferably exploiting or enhancing the beauty of a landscape with a special quality. These complexes included gardens that had been consciously designed, sometimes continuously over several building periods. The most outstanding are the gardens of King Matthias's palace in Buda and Visegrád.In Hungary, after the expulsion of the Turks, the country was so devastated that interest in gardens was slow to revive. The impetus of reconstruction, the interest of the country's lords and their receptiveness to Western European culture started the triumph of Baroque gardens in Hungary in the 18th century. Renaissance gardens were gradually transformed into Baroque gardens, but many new ones were also built. In Süttőr (now Fertőd), Prince Esterházy Pál created a large Baroque garden in 1726, which was further developed by Miklós Esterházy from 1753 onwards, creating the 'Hungarian Verszalia'. Gödöllő, Nagycenk, Nagytétény, Szirák, Hédervár, Mecseknádasd, to name but a few, were also the sites of several other important Baroque gardens of this period. Even at the end of the 18th century, when the Baroque garden was beginning to decline in the western half of Europe, many places were still developing gardens reflecting this belated concept.The development of landscape gardens in Hungary is inseparable from the great European epochs and ideological currents. The period from the second half of the 18th century to the end of the 19th century was one of the richest and most flourishing periods of Hungarian garden art. Most of our protected historic parks were built during this period, and a relatively large number of these gardens have survived to this day, retaining their most important stylistic features, some of their original plant stock and their spatial composition.Among the earliest "English gardens" were the garden of Count István Csáky in Illésfalvi, the Esterházy family's parks in Csákvár and Tata, Ráró, Vedrőd, Hédervár and the Orczy garden in Pest. These gardens are characterised by strong emotional influences, picturesqueness and a striving for singularity. Later, under the influence of foreign travels, fashionable pattern books and magazines, the building of landscape gardens became a status symbol among the aristocracy. Some of the parks were created by converting or extending existing Baroque gardens (Kismarton, Körmend, Hédervár, Nagycenk). A large number of new castles were also built, with a clean, typically Hungarian classicist style (Alcsút, Dénesfa, Lovasberény, Bodajk, Fehérvárcsurgó, Seregélyes), surrounded by large-scale classical landscape parks. During the 19th century, the role and ornamental value of plants became very important, accompanied by a great fever for plant collecting, the building of greenhouses and a movement for plant breeding and plant domestication, which led to the creation of dendrological and collector gardens.This publication takes you on a tour of 200 of the most important and interesting gardens in Hungary.