MAIN BOTANICAL GARDEN OF THE ACADEMY OF SCIENCES

Russian Glavny Botanichesky Sad Akademi Nauk, one of the world's largest botanical gardens. Founded in 1945, it occupies a 360-hectare (889-acre) site in Moscow, Russia. About 21,000 varieties of plants are cultivated, many of which are native to Russia. One of its unique features is a large exhibit area where plants are grouped according to the geographic regions to which they are native. The Main Botanical Garden carries on research on matters pertaining to plant introduction and acclimatization and conducts field trials of valuable new species and subspecies. For this purpose, many hundreds of plants from other continents are grown. The garden maintains a herbarium of some 267,000 reference specimens.