The rich abundance of plant life, combined with the spatial and economic constraints that botanical gardens and arboretums face, make it infeasible to accumulate complete collections of plants that can be cultivated in our climatic conditions. The best alternative in this situation is to create specialist collections.

National Collections are intended to preserve and maintain existing collections and create new ones by drawing up a mutual support program for their establishment and development. The passion of the people who create such collections is invariably the driving force behind them. In addition to being an excellent botanical education resource, the collection may be the showpiece of the garden, raising its standing, and is supposed to protect and preserve rare and threatened taxa, as well as old and forgotten decorative and usage cultivars. The landscape setting should also stimulate the creation of specialist and well-documented collections managed by experts, rather than general plant collections which, as a rule, are poorly validated and incomplete. At the same time, the program is intended to facilitate access to information on these collections, as well as the collections themselves, for scientists and other specialists by publishing information about National Collections in scientific journals and posting it on the Internet.

The National Collection is the richest plant collection in Poland. It is properly documented, marked and labelled according to standards, and managed by specialists. Some examples could be the Hosta genus collection, the Acer genus collection and the collection of old cultivars of apple trees.

Possessing a National Collection is a distinction for the owner and testifies that his or her collection is exceptional on a national scale. Those who own such collections are entitled to display the National Collection logo.