AT A GLANCE

Why go?

On the west bank of the Hooghly, opposite the bustle of Kolkata, the Acharya Jagadish Chandra Bose Indian Botanic Garden unfolds across some 273 acres of the most storied green space in South Asia. Founded in 1787 by Colonel Robert Kyd and run today by the Botanical Survey of India, it began life as the East India Company's 'Company Bagan'—an engine for trialling commercially valuable plants—and grew into one of the oldest and largest botanic gardens anywhere. Its avenues, mounds and lakes hold a living museum of more than a thousand species, but the real draw is a single tree.↗↗↗

Visitors come from around the world to stand beneath the Great Banyan, a tree so vast it reads as a forest rather than a specimen. Beyond it, the garden rewards slow wandering: interconnected lakes you can boat on, avenues named for long-dead botanists, and rare plants—the giant water lily, the double coconut palm, the baobab, the 'mad tree'—gathered here from every continent. It is one of the great eighteenth-century landscapes of the world, and a peaceful, shady escape just across the river from the city.↗