"Thomson's garden" in Irkutsk: Siberian lessons of one botanical history

The review portrays the history features of the popular «Thomson's Garden» development. The garden created in 1908 in the city of Irkutsk by August Karlovich Thomson, a talented developer of horticulture in the harsh Siberian climate. Passionate self-taught gardener was ahead of his time in overcoming climatic restrictions and social problems, driven by intuition and his own genius as an innovator, almost single-handedly created a unique natural ecological object with the largest collection of hardy enough fruit and ornamental plants in Eastern Siberia in the first half of the 20th century. As a result of the history of the «Thomson’s Garden» as a folk botanical garden, the conditions for creating the foundation of the collections of the Botanic Garden at Irkutsk State University in 1940 as well as the evolution of a public movement of gardeners-experimenters in Irkutsk were formed.