Sukhumi Botanical Garden

one of the oldest botanical gardens in the USSR; part of the Academy of Sciences of the Georgian SSR. The garden, founded in 1840, was directed by a military office until 1889 and was called the Sukhumi Military Botanical Garden. It is situated in the center of the city of Sukhumi. The public gardens occupy 7 hectares (ha), and the experimental sections, 18 ha.

In the first years after its establishment, the Sukhumi Botanical Garden introduced valuable subtropical plants, including tea, citrus fruits, and several plants cultivated for essential oils. Since the establishment of Soviet power, the garden has been enlarged and reconstructed. Its basic work includes the introduction and cultivation of new, useful plants and the study of the flora of Abkhazia. The botanical garden includes divisions of plant introduction, botany, floriculture, and landscape architecture and laboratories of the physiology and cytoembryology of plants and plant protection.

The botanical garden has more than 4,500 species, varieties, and forms of plants, including approximately 1,200 species of subtropical trees and shrubs, many of which are rare among the cultivated flora of the USSR. There are outdoor plantings of subtropical fruit trees, including avocado, papaw, and Podocarpus, plants with medical and technical value, including Pilocarpus and Peumus boldus, and aquatic plants, such as victoria, white and pink lotus, water poppy, and water hyacinth. Bananas, coffee beans, and melons are cultivated in greenhouses. The most important species in the garden are green winter trees of Japanese-Chinese and North American origin. The garden also cultivates several recently introduced species of trees and shrubs and varieties and strains of flowering plants. It has unique collections of Tertiary fossil plants and herbaria of introduced and native flora. Approximately 500,000 people visit the botanical garden annually. Since 1961 the garden has published its proceedings.