Bakuriani Alpine Botanical Garden

This is the highest botanical garden in Georgia, at around 1,700 metres on the north-western edge of Bakuriani, between pine forest and hay meadows. It was founded in 1910 as the high-mountain department of the Tbilisi Botanical Garden and it is still a working research station: its purpose a century ago was the study and acclimatisation of alpine and subalpine plants, and that has not changed.

The grounds cover roughly seventeen hectares, divided into several parts: demonstration beds of Caucasian alpine meadow species, a rock garden, an arboretum of conifers introduced from North America and East Asia, rhododendron plantings and experimental plots. In the middle stand small wooden buildings that still hold Soviet-era scientific equipment.

The conifer arboretum is the part that has aged best. Trees planted a century ago as experiments now stand tall enough to shade the paths, and walking between them is the nearest thing here to a designed avenue. The alpine beds work the other way round: they peak for a few weeks and for the rest of the summer read as ordinary meadow unless you stop and check the labels.

Late June and July are the best weeks, when the alpine beds flower more or less at once. August is drier and quieter; by September the colour comes from the conifers and the birches instead. In winter the garden lies under snow and is closed.

It is worth being clear about what this is not. It is not a manicured municipal park. Many paths are simply tracks worn through grass, a good share of the labels have gone missing, and some plots look frankly abandoned. Anyone hoping for landscape design will be disappointed. Anyone who is interested in plants, or who simply wants a quiet hour after the noise of Bakuriani's main street, has come to the right place: there is usually almost nobody here, and the smell of resin and the sound of bees are the only background.