In 1654, just three years after the founding of the nearby town of Krasnokutsk, Cossacks established the male Cossack Peter and Paul Monastery on this very ground. The monks reshaped the land to suit a life of prayer and self-sufficiency: they excavated two ponds and dug an extensive system of caves and underground passageways into the ravine's flank. The monastery endured for over a century until Catherine the Great ordered it closed, part of her sweeping suppression of religious houses. In 1768 she handed the monastery's lands and buildings to Colonel Nazar Karazin as a reward for his service in the Russo-Turkish War. It was Nazar's son, Ivan Karazin, who in 1793 set aside seventeen hectares of the former holy ground and began planting the arboretum that survives today.

The garden the Karazins built is a study in gentle drama. Its central axis follows the spine of a ravine that widens gradually into an open hollow, its slopes carved into terraces, its floor threaded with ponds, dams, and streams. Two ponds anchor the design, fed by four spring-wells, and across the surface of the upper pond float lotuses in an unlikely spectrum of red, pink, lemon, cream, and white. At its center sits a small island the Karazins raised by hand and named, with romantic flourish, the Island of Love. The family that founded this place was not an ordinary one: Ivan's brother, Vasyl Karazin, went on to found what became the University of Kharkiv, one of Ukraine's great institutions of learning. The garden and the university sprang from the same restless, improving family.

The garden's design reads the land like a text. The monks had chosen the ravine for its seclusion, and the Karazins worked with the shape they inherited rather than against it. The slopes were cut into terraces that step down toward the water; dams and streams thread the hollow's floor; the whole composition follows the natural watershed as it opens gradually into a wider basin. On the ravine's eastern side, the monastic tunnels still run beneath the surface, a hidden lower story to the visible garden above. The effect is of a place with two dimensions of time layered atop each other, the ornamental eighteenth-century park on the surface, the seventeenth-century labor of prayer and excavation buried below, both shaped by people who saw in this quiet fold of Ukrainian land something worth building to last.

For all its designed beauty, the arboretum is very much alive, home to roughly three dozen kinds of animals recorded in its bounds. Hedgehogs rustle through the undergrowth; owls and sparrowhawks hunt the terraces; nightingales, thrushes, starlings, titmice, and pigeons fill the canopy with song. The garden's fortunes have risen and fallen with history's tides. After the revolution of 1917 it passed to the Kharkiv Regional Agricultural Research Station, and by the mid-twentieth century it had fallen into neglect. Its revival began in 1957, when a reorganization of the local horticultural experimental station folded the old park back into scientific care, restored and expanded it, and gave it the name it carries now. Two and a half centuries after the first Karazin planting, and nearly four since the monks first broke ground, the ravine still shelters both its trees and its tunnels.