I had lived in Astana for years before I finally visited the greenhouse at the city’s Botanical Garden. Looking back, I’m not entirely sure why it took me so long. I’d walked through the park countless times, watched runners weave between its paths, admired the flower beds in summer and the endless white snow in winter, yet somehow I had never stepped inside the greenhouse.
Maybe that’s because from the outside it doesn’t prepare you for what’s waiting behind the glass. Photo credit: The Astana Times. Collage is created by The Astana Times. The moment the doors close, Astana disappears. The dry steppe air gives way to warm humidity. The scent of wet soil replaces the smell of asphalt.
Palm leaves stretch above your head, citrus trees are heavy with fruit, papayas quietly ripen in one corner, coffee berries turn bright red in another, and for a second your brain struggles to reconcile what your eyes are seeing. You are still standing in one of the coldest capitals in the world, yet everything around you belongs somewhere thousands of kilometers to the south.
It feels almost impossible. Laila Zekenova, the head of the greenhouse. Photo credit: The Astana Times. The Astana Botanical Garden officially opened in 2018 as part of the celebrations marking the capital’s twentieth anniversary. Scientists from Kazakhstan worked alongside colleagues from Germany, Italy, France and several CIS countries to create what has become not only a public attraction but also an important scientific collection dedicated to preserving plant biodiversity.
That scientific mission is exactly what brought me to Laila Zekenova, the head of the greenhouse, who has spent years looking after hundreds of species that have somehow learned to call Astana home. “Our main goal is to preserve biodiversity. The species that were brought here and added to our collection—we have to preserve them.
That is our primary mission,” she told me almost immediately. It sounds simple enough when she says it. In reality, keeping tropical plants alive through Astana’s winters is anything but simple. “We also organize workshops, tastings and educational activities for visitors.
It’s all about introducing people to tropical species,” she added. As we slowly walked between the different sections of the greenhouse, it became obvious that every plant here had its own story, and every story seemed to begin with adaptation. One of the first things that caught my eye was an orange tree covered in fruit.
Seeing oranges growing in Astana feels strangely intimate. Perhaps it’s because oranges belong so firmly to my childhood memories of New Year’s celebrations that seeing them hanging from a tree rather than stacked in supermarket boxes somehow makes them seem even more exotic.