Acharya Jagadish Chandra Bose Indian Botanic Garden

Address: Shibpur, Howrah 
Timing:  8am-5pm, closed Mondays 
Entry: Modest entry and camera fee
Arrive by ferry from Chandpal or Babughat: the river approach, with old trees visible from the water defining the Howrah skyline, is the correct way in. Established 1787 by Lieutenant-Colonel Robert Kyd for cultivating commercially useful plants (Assam and Darjeeling tea was propagated here first), it’s now 273 acres holding over 12,000 species, its present form owed mostly to Sir George King’s 1871 redesign.
The Great Banyan Tree occupies roughly 1.5 hectares and is among the widest trees on earth by canopy. Its original trunk died of fungal infection around 1925, leaving a forest of over 3,600 interconnected aerial-root prop trunks, still expanding, estimated at 250-300 years old and about 486 metres in circumference. Walking through it is genuinely disorienting: the light filters to a submarine green and you lose track of which “edge” is which. Give it time.
Formal avenues of rain trees, a significant cycad collection, a dense bamboo grove and Victorian glass-and-iron Palm and Orchid Houses (in the Kew tradition) round out the grounds. Ferries run from Chandpal and Babughat roughly every 15-30 minutes, c. 7:45am-8:15pm; the road approach via Howrah is considerably less pleasant.