Tallinn Botanic Garden

This guide to the Tallinn Botanic Garden traces a near-century wait, from an eighteen-sixties proposal for a botanic garden on land that once belonged to Estonia's first president, Konstantin Päts, to the Academy of Sciences finally founding one in nineteen sixty-one. It follows landscape architect Aleksander Niine, who spent the next decade turning bare forest along the Pirita River into an arboretum arranged by botanical kinship rather than by looks. The outdoor grounds opened to the public in nineteen seventy, the greenhouses a year later, with Niine dying only a few years after seeing visitors walk through his design.