National Botanical Garden

This guide to Havana's National Botanical Garden follows Johannes Bisse, the German-born botanist who arrived in Cuba in 1966 and spent nearly two decades turning scrubland into a curated collection of four thousand species after Fidel Castro announced the project in 1968. It traces the long gap before the garden opened to the public, and the way Bisse arranged palms and forest like a curator hanging a collection. It also leads into the Japanese Garden that arrived later.