Botanical Garden of Uzhhorod National University

A giant sequoia has been growing on this hillside above the Uzh for more than seventy years. It stands around 20 metres and is the largest tree in the collection, which in the arithmetic of its own species makes it a sapling — Sierra Nevada sequoias run past 80 metres and three thousand years. Whoever planted it here in the early 1950s was planting for somebody else.

That is roughly the temperament of the Botanical Garden of Uzhhorod National University: 4.5 hectares on three terraces, a few hundred metres downhill from the castle, planted densely enough that a slow lap takes you through North America, China, the Caucasus and the Carpathians. It is a research department of the university — five sections, and an Index Seminum traded with gardens abroad — that happens to be one of the better walks in the city.

Two orchards and a hillside

The decision to found a garden at the new university was taken on 28 November 1945, the order signed the day after; Khoma Rudenko was its first director. The ground handed over was not empty. Two private fruit-and-walnut orchards stood there — ninety-odd walnut trees among apples, pears, cherries and plums, with elder, briar and willow along the edges. Making a scientific collection of it meant clearing, cutting the slope into terraces and starting the plantings from nothing.

In 1979 the Council of Ministers listed the garden as a monument of garden-and-park art, then at republican and now at national level, and allotted it a further 83 hectares out in the Shakhta district on the edge of town — land that remains ordinary woodland. What you walk is still the original 4.5. Staff cuts and the flood of 1998 left the place badly run down; Dmytro Soyma took over in 2000 and spent years rebuilding the arboretum.

Twenty-two metres of vertical

The three terraces drop about 22 metres from top to bottom, over volcanic rock under worked clay, and that gradient is doing real work: open upper slopes for one set of species, deep shade under the old trees for another. Beds are grouped by where their plants come from — American, Chinese, Far Eastern, Caucasian, Central Asian — with an arboretum, a rose garden, a conifer collection, a mountain rockery and the glasshouses at one end.

The trees worth finding

Two of the best carry dates. The ginkgo went in in 1948 and the tulip tree in 1950, making them nearly as old as the garden itself. There is also a metasequoia — a conifer known only from fossils until living stands were found in central China in the 1940s, after which material went out to botanical gardens worldwide. The conifers run to about 130 species and varieties, bald cypress, yew and Japanese cryptomeria among them; the broadleaves include sugar maple, Japanese pagoda tree and sweet chestnut.

The flowering year opens with ten species of magnolia and white sakura, carries on through some 27 rhododendrons and peaks in June in a rose garden of over a hundred varieties, with lilies, gladioli and chrysanthemums behind it. Two sections stay closer to home: roughly 400 plants of the Carpathians, and a rockery of more than 150 mountain species, edelweiss among them. Forty-five of the garden's plants are classed as rare, twenty-one of those in Ukraine's Red Book.

Bananas in a Transcarpathian November

The glasshouses are why the garden holds up in February. Divided into cold, temperate and warm sections, they carry more than 900 species, forms and varieties: bananas, papaya, eucalyptus, laurel, ten or so palms and a cactus collection several hundred strong, with azaleas, camellias and gardenias flowering among them and relict ferns in the damp corners. Coming in off a wet Uzhhorod street, half an hour in the warm section is worth the whole slope outside.

Getting there

The entrance is on vul. Ivana Olbrakhta, named for the Czech novelist who spent the 1930s writing about Transcarpathia. Uzhhorod Castle and the open-air folk museum are both a few minutes uphill, which makes an easy morning of all three. Spring brings the magnolias and sakura, June the roses, and the glasshouses work in any season. It is a university facility rather than a city park, so check opening arrangements before you go.