The Sukhum Botanical Garden and Imperial Russia’s Tropical Utopia

• In Event: Botanical Histories of Tsarist Central Asia and the Caucasus

Abstract

In the first half of the nineteenth century, the South Caucasus became a testing ground for tsarist efforts to cultivate exotic plantation crops. While most of these attempts ended in failure, one stood out as a remarkable success. This paper explores the history of the Sukhum Botanical Garden during the imperial era: Russia’s first open-air nursery for (sub)tropical vegetation in the South Caucasus. It examines how imperial botany and agricultural science intersected with the tsarist dream of the tropics, making the garden a laboratory of competing ecological, colonial, and societal visions.

Author

• Oleksandr Polianichev, Södertörn U (Sweden)