Zugdidi Botanical Garden

Zugdidi's botanical garden is among the oldest in Georgia, and it begins immediately behind the Dadiani palace. The two belong together: they are two sides of the same family's life.

The garden was laid out in the 1840s by Ekaterine Chavchavadze-Dadiani, wife of David Dadiani. She was a daughter of the poet Alexander Chavchavadze and a sister of Nino, Griboedov's widow; after her husband's death in 1853 she became regent of Mingrelia, and later moved to Paris. The garden is what happened when a European education met the Colchic climate.

That climate decides everything here: mild wet winters and well over fifteen hundred millimetres of rain a year. Subtropical species grow outdoors without glass, which is why the estate became a place for trying out plants brought from Japan, China and the Americas.

The garden now covers about twenty-six hectares. In it are cryptomeria, camphor laurel, magnolias, Himalayan cedar, cork oak, sequoia, bamboo, ginkgo and loquat. Some trees are close to two centuries old and thick enough that two people cannot reach round them.

The structure is a set of old avenues, a small pond in the middle, and the remains of formal beds. In the Soviet period this was a scientific institution; now it is half wild.

In the Soviet decades western Georgia was the citrus, tea and tung-oil district of the entire union, and the garden served that programme: new varieties were trialled here before being planted out across Samegrelo. Traces remain — old citrus stock, tea bushes at the edges of the avenues, and a bamboo grove by the eastern wall that is the loudest thing in the garden in a wind.

The museum next door belongs to the same story. Three minutes away in the Dadiani palace is Napoleon's death mask, which reached Mingrelia through the marriage of Salome Dadiani and Achille Murat. Two inheritances of one family, exotic trees and a Bonaparte relic, sit side by side.

It is fair to say plainly what it is not. This is not a manicured show garden. Paths turn to mud after rain, labelling is thin, and parts of it are simply neglected. Anyone arriving with Batumi's botanical garden in mind will be disappointed.

What it offers instead is emptiness. People from Zugdidi walk dogs here, schoolchildren skip lessons, and the birds are loud. April and May bring magnolia and azalea; November brings colour. Those are the two best moments.

An hour is enough for a walk through, two if you start looking at individual trees.