In the area known today as Votanikos (which means botanical in Greek) Bavarian botanist Karl Nikolas Fraas founded modern Greece’s first such gardens around 1840, a small section of which still survives thanks to the University of Athens.

The Diomedes Botanical Gardens proper is located a few kilometers to the west, in Haidari, and it is the Eastern Mediterranean’s largest garden of its kind, named after its donors Ioulia and Alexandros Diomedes.

Its story begins around 1950, with Alexandros Diomedes’s decision to donate part of his sizable fortune to the University of Athens for the creation of a foundation in his name, administered by the university ever since. Diomedes’s dream came to fruition after a 1961 decision by the Ministry of Agriculture to grant the foundation a forested area, today’s Botanical Garden.

The grounds contain more than 500 species of flora. Bordering the park, one of Attica’s earliest pine (Pinus halepensis) and kermes oak shrub (Quercus coccifera) forests stands majestically, defying time. Mediterranean pine covers the garden’s vast expanse, artificially enriched with Turkish pine (Pinus brutus) and cypress (Cupressus sempervirens).

Of special interest to experts and amateur aficionados alike is the endemic chasmophyte plant, growing in the crags of the garden’s limestone hills. Visitors will surely appreciate the sight of resilient bellflowers (Campanula saxatillis), sprouting among sturdy rocks, Fritillaria lilies, wild cyclamen, winter lilies and numerous native orchids, adding their bold colors to the autumnal ochre. Kept in the Diomedes Botanical Garden’s herbarium are over 19,000 dried plant samples, the majority of which were collected from nature reserves, while the foundation’ s Genetic Bank hosts gametes from more than 800 species.

Numerous research projects are carried out on the grounds of the Diomedes Botanical Gardens by the university’s graduate students, although the garden’s greatest contribution is its ability – thanks to University of Athens guided tours – to sensitize the younger generation to the beauty of nature and the urgent need to preserve it.

Originally published in Kathimerini newspaper