Mangyshlak experimental Botanical Garden

Mangystau Experimental Botanical Garden, founded in 1972 in the present city of Aktau, Mangystau region. It is under the Botany and Phytointroduction Institute of the Ministry of Education and Science of the Republic of Kazakhstan. Area 37.9 ha. Engages in research of plant species that are rare in western Kazakhstan and grow in local natural conditions. Currently the garden has sections working with: open‑seeded plants, flat‑leafed plants brought from other regions, local flora, fruit‑bearing, shrub, ornamental‑flowering plants, new varieties of grain and forage crops. Main scientific‑research directions of the botanical garden: acclimatization of plants introduced from other places; determination of growth and bio‑ecological characteristics of species under unfavorable climatic conditions; maintenance of introductions; study of agronomy of plant cultivation and control of their reproductive laws; study of the vegetation cover of the Mangystau region and use of valuable species in agriculture; scientific organization of horticultural and park constructions, greening of settlements in the foothills. The garden contains 191 species belonging to 79 families of higher plants. For example, there are 18 rose families, 24 complex‑flower families, 16 cereal families, 12 legume families. Primarily, 47 % of the biological taxa growing in the garden are shrubs, 22 % trees, 24 % perennial herbaceous plants, 2.5 % annual plants. Currently the garden’s collection includes 51 very rare species. Among them 19 are flat‑leafed (Turkestan black‑thorn, Caspian black‑thorn, etc.); 14 are fruit‑bearing (Ledebur wheat, Nedzvetzky apple, etc.); 12 are spiny‑leafed (Zeravshan thistle, Turkestan thistle, etc.); 6 are ornamental‑flowering (kyr zhua, Colenati bellflower, etc.) plants. Since its establishment many works have been carried out on horticultural and park construction and landscape architecture. Staff have created a comprehensive scale of aesthetic assessment of plant cover; a scale for identifying valuable plants introduced from elsewhere; a unified classification of Mangystau soil cover‑melioration conditions; an express‑method diagnostic of agro‑chemical indicators of brown and purple‑brown soils; and defined principles of ecological description of introduced species.