T amar Galstyan trained at the University of Art and Theatre in Yerevan and afterwards turned to ecology, working as a teacher and slowly building, almost as a side project, a photographic record of the Armenian flora. The website she made for her students grew into the Facebook page Plants of Armenia, now a working reference for botanists and gardeners across the region.
From 2012 she began guiding botanical trips, first in Armenia and then across Georgia, Iran and Central Asia. The flora of the Caucasus is among the richest in the world and contains the wild relatives of many garden plants — material she has spent years documenting in the field and translating for an audience outside the region. Her interview on the Roots and All podcast gives a sense of the country she has been quietly mapping.
Her Field Guide to the Plants of Armenia describes more than a thousand species — bulbs, herbaceous plants, woody plants, grasses and ferns, each with photograph, description and distribution map — and is the first comprehensive English-language guide to the country's flora.
