National Botanic Garden

Salaspils, Latvia, Latvia

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The National Botanic Garden of Latvia (Latvian: Nacionālais botāniskais dārzs) is located in Salaspils, Latvia, and is the largest botanical garden in Latvia and the Baltics, covering 129 hectares. Founded in 1956 as a successor to C. W. Schoch's plant nursery that began in Salaspils at the end of the 19th century, the garden's origins date back even further to 1798 when gardener Johann Hermann Zigra established a plant nursery in Riga. The garden holds the largest collection of plants in the Baltics with more than 14,000 different taxa (species, forms, and varieties), including over 5,000 taxa of woody plants, making it one of the richest living plant collections in Northeast Europe. Its main tasks include botanical research, ornamental horticulture, creating greenery, plant introduction, genetics, selection, and popularizing research, and it was granted research institute status in 1968. Notable features include one of the largest arboretums in North-Eastern Europe with more than 5,000 plants, orchards, rosaries, ornamental plants, and important collections of crucifers, mountain ash, spirea, low conifers, and decorative apple trees. In April 2015, a new greenhouse complex (conservatory) was opened featuring plants from around the world.