Batumi Botanical Garden

Batumi Botanical Garden lies in Adjara on the Green Cape, 9 kilometres from the centre of Batumi. It occupies the south-western section, about a kilometre long, of the coastal strip between the mouth of the Chakvistskali and the Green Cape, and rises from the sea to 220 metres; the hills are divided by deep ravines, and a steep bluff separates the garden from the sea. The garden covers 108.7 hectares; other accounts give 111 hectares. The relief is hilly and the soil mostly red earth.

The garden is laid out on the landscape-geographic principle: it has three dendroparks, a reserve of Colchian forest and nine floristic sections, those of the humid subtropics of Transcaucasia, Australia, New Zealand, the Himalayas, East Asia, North America, South America, Mexico and the Mediterranean. The collection holds more than 5,000 species, varieties, forms and cultivars, among them 2,037 taxa of woody plants, 104 of them of Caucasian origin. There are more than 80 cultivars of Japanese camellia, magnolias, rhododendrons, bamboo, sequoias, Mexican pines and the Tertiary relicts of Colchis: Ungern's and Pontic rhododendron and Pontic oak.

The garden has three parks, the Upper Park, the Lower Park and the Giorgi Gabrichidze Seaside Park; the Lower Park has the house of D'Alphonse, and the Upper Park squares named after Gordeziani and Ilia II. The grave and monument of Andrei Krasnov are in the garden. It is also a scientific institution with a herbarium and experimental plots for acclimatisation, and since 1998 a member of Botanic Gardens Conservation International (BGCI).

The history of the garden begins in 1881, when one of the first summer settlers, Mecheslav D'Alphonse, started introducing plants in his own garden near Chakvi. In 1892 the geographer and botanist Pavle Tatarinov laid out a 10-hectare acclimatisation garden, known today as the Upper Park of the botanical garden. In the 1890s two large botanical expeditions to South-East Asia were organised under Andrei Krasnov, professor at Kharkov University, and brought back tea and other valuable plants, which were planted in the nursery at Chakvi.

Krasnov received permission to found the garden in 1912 and was appointed its director; the garden opened officially on 3 November 1912. The land set aside was then virgin forest of beech, chestnut and hornbeam from the Green Cape to Chakvi. Krasnov, already gravely ill, took an active part in planning the grounds and decided to create fragments of different subtropical regions on the landscape-geographic principle; two skilled gardeners helped him, the Frenchman D'Alphonse and the Georgian Iason Gordeziani. Krasnov died at the end of 1914 and was buried in the garden.

In the Soviet period, from 1925, the garden was enlarged and became the principal institution for the study of the maritime subtropical crops of the Caucasus; it belonged to the Georgian Academy of Sciences. Since 1998 the garden has been a member of BGCI, and since 2006 it has been an independent institution.

The garden is 9 kilometres from the centre of Batumi, near the Green Cape railway station. Microbus No. 40 runs daily every 15 minutes from the Batumi Trade Center (Aghmashenebeli Street) along Chavchavadze Street; from the stop at the entrance to Chakvi it is 300 metres to the 3rd ticket office, and the fare is 50 tetri. Bus No. 10 runs daily every 40 minutes from Zeda Gele Street and stops 100 metres from the 2nd ticket office. Entry is paid: a ticket costs 25 lari, 10 lari for citizens and permanent residents of Georgia, 5 lari for students and pensioners who are Georgian citizens (pensioners with permanent residence included) and 2 lari for schoolchildren who are Georgian citizens; the reduced prices require ID. Some categories enter free. The garden offers guide services, an electric vehicle service and camping. Check the opening hours on the garden's official site.