Donetsk: Botanical Garden and Plant Worlds

The Donetsk Botanical Garden brings together steppe landscapes, designed gardens, and extensive plant collections. Its themes range from native habitats of the Donbas to Japanese garden styles and woody plants. This makes it possible to explore Donetsk through a wide variety of botanical highlights.

The Steppes of the Donbas and Their Habitats

The Botanical Garden covers 203 hectares and lies on the border between Donetsk and Makiivka. In its southern area is the 8.5-hectare “Steppes of the Donbas” exhibition: an artificially created feather-grass steppe with 420 species. The collection of the same name includes more than 200 rare, endemic, relict, and endangered species; around 180 of them are listed in red books and conservation lists.

The collection complex covers a range of topics. These include 120 species of steppe and woodland-edge plants and 174 species of medicinal plants. The “Edaphic Variants of the Steppes of the Donbas” exhibition presents vegetation from rocky granite and chalk outcrops, as well as sandy steppes, created under specially designed conditions and characteristic of the natural environment of the Donbas. Rather than treating the steppe as a uniform plant landscape, the landscapes on display highlight different habitats of the region.

Collections Between the Greenhouses and Woody Plants

The Botanical Garden’s collection comprises more than 8,000 plant taxa, including over 3,000 tropical and subtropical taxa kept in collection greenhouses. One greenhouse displays, among other plants, lemons, limes, grapefruits, oranges, mandarins, papaya, feijoa, guava, coffee, Murraya, Barbados cotton, and paprika peppers. The plants listed range from citrus fruits to useful and spice plants.

Woody plants also have their own themed areas. The “Rare Woody Plants” exhibition combines its woody-plant collection with the “Seabed,” “Junipers,” and “Topiary” areas. The “Syringarium” was established in 1978 and includes 20 species and forms, as well as 140 lilac cultivars. These include nine early-flowering cultivars of hyacinth lilac, a Preston hybrid, and other common lilac cultivars, including varieties bred at the garden. These figures describe the size of the collection; holdings may change as the collections develop.

The Japanese Garden as a Designed Strolling Garden

The Japanese Garden is designed as a strolling garden. Its features include a rock garden, a landscape garden, a dry stream, and a water garden with a pond. In the dry stream, pebbles and phlox blooming in spring symbolize flowing water. The design brings different garden forms together: the pond as a water feature and the stream as a deliberately dry element.

The garden’s Japanese and Far Eastern flora includes 58 species of woody plants and 60 species of perennial herbaceous plants. This plant collection adds a distinct botanical focus to the designed garden areas. Together, these areas show how the garden can be explored both through plant groups and through different landscape and design ideas.

Foundation and Historical Context

An encyclopedia article, last revised in 2008, gives 1964 as the year the Botanical Garden was founded. The same article notes that it was recognized as a garden and park monument in 1981 and designated a botanical garden of national importance in 1992. These details provide historical context for the garden and its recorded designations.

Find Hotels in Donetsk

The highlights described here can help you plan the botanical part of your trip, from steppe flora and its habitats to the designed garden areas and greenhouse collections.

Discover more destinations: Kramatorsk, Yats'kivka, Amvrosiivka, Prokhorivka, Shchurove, Slovyansk, Nyzhnya Krynka, Yenakiieve.

See the regional travel overview: Donetsk Oblast.