Tashkent Botanical Garden Greenhouse

Tashkent Botanical Garden, named after the academician Fyodor Rusanov, had two beginnings: an initial 8-hectare garden founded in 1922, and the large present-day garden laid out from 1950. Rusanov directed it from 1943 to 1975 and remained scientific adviser until 1979. Plants were already grown under glass in Soviet times: by the 1980s more than 1,000 species were cultivated in protected conditions.

In 1995, 22 of the garden's 80 hectares were taken for the new Tashkent Zoo, which opened in 1997, and the tree plantings on that land were cleared. By way of compensation the garden received growing houses, a boiler house and a new exhibition glasshouse. The latter suffered from poor workmanship from the outset: with no shading system, staff had to coat the glass with a clay wash, and the irrigation equipment failed almost immediately. In the winter of 2011–2012 a heating breakdown during a frost killed around 500 plants. Proposals drawn up in January 2014 envisaged reorganising the collection into three sections.

In 2023, a plan to place the garden under commercial management prompted a public statement from Saida Mirziyoyeva, assistant to the president, insisting that it remain under the Academy of Sciences.

The glasshouse built after 1995 had original shortcomings: the lack of any shading, which forced staff to daub the glass with clay to shield plants from the summer sun, and a pulse-irrigation system that quickly broke down. It depends on the boiler house built at the same time, whose failure in the winter of 2011–2012 exposed the vulnerability of the whole installation. The 2014 renovation proposals called for dividing the space into three sections for tropical, subtropical and aquatic plants.

When it opened, the glasshouse held around 800 species of tropical and subtropical plants, fewer than the roughly 1,000 species grown under glass in the 1980s. The heating failure of 2011–2012 cost some 500 plants. Around the glasshouse, the 65-hectare garden holds about 6,000 species, forms and cultivars, arranged in geographical sections devoted to Europe and the Caucasus, the Mediterranean coast, Central and East Asia and North America; among them are a dozen ginkgos and dawn redwoods.

The garden lies in Yunusabad district in the north of Tashkent, near Bodomzor metro station and next to the zoo built on its former land. For a long time open only to guided groups, it began selling tickets for independent visits in the 1990s. A visit to the glasshouse combines naturally with a walk through the outdoor collections, whose geographical sections lead from the flora of the Caucasus to that of East Asia or North America. In 2023 Saida Mirziyoyeva stressed that the garden is no amusement park but the lungs of Tashkent. Since 1 April 2026 bicycles and scooters have been banned from the grounds following visitor falls.