Gardens of the Silk Road

The first thing you notice about Tashkent is the shade. The afternoon opens in the Botanical Garden of the Academy of Sciences, where your expert introduces the cast of the whole journey — the wild ancestors of tulip, apple, walnut and apricot — then moves through the Japanese Garden to the seed rows of Chorsu, where grandmothers sell basil and marigold seed by the glassful.

One generation ago this field grew cotton; today it grows peaches, and the farmer will tell you why. The high-speed train crosses the steppe to Bukhara, and after the Poi Kalyan and the trading domes we drive out to a family orchard planted on old cotton land — one of the great agricultural stories of our time, told plainly, with the thin-skinned Bukhara lemon to taste.

Cotton is not a villain here; it is a family member with a complicated history. Tea at the home of a Bukharian biologist opens the question of how a desert city fed itself for two millennia. Then a working day with cotton farmers in the northern garden belt, and an afternoon among the roses and peacocks of the last Emir's summer palace.

Samarkand's grapes were praised by Chinese envoys thirteen centuries before anyone praised its architecture to you. We drive straight from the station into vineyard country — Kishmish, ancestor of the sultana; Husayni, the lady-finger of the courtyard trellis — then the historic Khovrenko winery, founded 1868, with a tasting. At dusk, the Registan turns its tilework to fire.

Six hundred years ago this was the best-gardened city on earth; today is spent inside that memory. Mulberry-bark paper pressed by your own hands at Konigil, suzani embroidery in Urgut — a garden in thread, stitched by brides — and in the evening a chorbagh feast on carpets among the trees, plov over fire, wine poured, and Ulugbek's stars overhead when the lights go out.

The forest on this pass was planted by hand, tree by tree, and the village remembers who planted it. A day hosted in a mountain village house: a botanical walk through the nineteenth-century woodland, bread baked in the tandoor, a long lunch under the apricot trees. In the evening, the comfortable train north to Tashkent.

In the Fergana Valley a courtyard without a vine trellis is considered an unfinished house. Through the Kamchik pass into the greenest landscape between China and the Caspian, and an afternoon in the courtyard of a master grape gardener — how vines are buried each winter and raised each spring, which varieties his grandfather kept, and which he has added. Neighbours join for tea.

Before leaving Uzbekistan we see its gardens one last time: woven into ikat silk at Margilan and painted onto Rishton's cobalt plates — gardeners read these patterns instantly; they have been reading them in borders all their lives. After lunch we walk across the Dostyk border into Kyrgyzstan and climb Sulaiman-Too, the sacred mountain of Osh.

Every walnut tree in every garden on earth has family in the forest we sleep beside tonight. North through Uzgen, where the red devzira rice grows and the eleventh-century minaret still stands, then up into Arslanbob — the largest natural walnut forest on earth, with wild apples and pears growing beneath the canopy. Legend says Alexander carried these walnuts to Greece.

You leave Arslanbob the way you leave a grandparent's orchard: with your pockets full. A forester walks you among the ancient trees to the waterfall — each family here holds hereditary rights to its own trees, an orchard tenure centuries old — and you taste honey from hives that stand among the walnuts. Then down to the turquoise water of Toktogul.

Some landscapes cannot be gardened. They can only be witnessed. The great wilderness traverse of the journey follows emerald water through towering red-rock canyons, with Dr Myrzabekova reading the canyon flora as we go. We stop with a beekeeping family for white Suusamyr honey among the hives, picnic by the river, and arrive by evening in Kochkor, homeland of Kyrgyz felt.

A shyrdak carpet is the nomad's garden: flowers cut in felt, so spring can live inside a yurt through winter. A hands-on morning with the women's felt cooperative — you roll, cut a motif, and take your piece home — then over the ridge to Issyk-Kul, the world's second-largest alpine lake, and a walk among three-thousand-year-old petroglyphs above the shore.

The alpine meadow is the oldest garden style on earth, and nobody planted it. A morning walking the flower-rich meadows of Semenovsk Gorge at a gardener's pace — the original of which every naturalistic planting is a copy, interpreted by the professor who teaches its systematics. In the afternoon, a berkutchi flies his golden eagle, and you feel the wind of her wings.

A minaret alone in a field of steppe grass and poppies: the Silk Road, edited down to one image. Down through the Boom Gorge to Burana, all that remains of the Karakhanid capital of Balasagun — and there is a poetry here: Dr Myrzabekova's university carries Balasagun's name, and today she reads the steppe flora of the city itself. Bishkek by late afternoon.

In the morning, a green Soviet garden city; in the afternoon, the mountains that supplied every plant in it. Bishkek's oak parks and street trees first, then Ala-Archa National Park, forty minutes away, where a gentle river walk carries you among four-thousand-metre peaks. A farewell dinner closes the circle the botanical garden opened fifteen days ago.

Individual transfers to Manas airport for your onward flights — or stay: extra nights in Bishkek, a return through Tashkent, or a private extension are all easily arranged. You leave with seeds of another kind: the memory of the wild originals, growing exactly where they have always grown.