Botanical gardens and nature parks are among my favourite kinds of sights

Botanical gardens and nature parks are among my favourite kinds of sights. So the first thing I did on arriving in Sochi, where we had come for the premiere of the new season of «Tonky vkus» [«A Refined Taste»], was to head for the Sochi Arboretum, one of the best-known and oldest park-museums in Russia, founded at the end of the nineteenth century.

The arboretum's creator, Sergey Nikolayevich Khudekov, was a writer, art historian and patron of the arts who left a notable mark on the cultural history of Russia. In 1892 he acquired a plot of land on the southern slope of a mountain and set about creating a unique park, in which he gathered rare plants from all over the world.

Today the Sochi Arboretum covers more than 49 hectares, and its collection includes over 1,800 species of trees and shrubs, chiefly representing subtropical flora.

Here one can see a giant sequoia, against which I had myself photographed as a keepsake, Atlas cedars, rare deciduous-branch plants, Japanese cryptomerias, a cypress with aerial roots, the Canary Island date palm and other palms, various species of oak, bamboo, cacti and magnolias. The park is divided into two parts, lower and upper, linked by a cable car, from which there is a view of the Black Sea and the green hills.