St Petersburg State University Botanical Garden

Tucked away in the inner courtyard of the Twelve Collegia building on Vasilyevsky Island is the university's botanical garden, one of the oldest in the city. On an area of about 1.75 hectares is gathered a collection comprising more than 4,600 plant species from every continent.

The garden was established in 1841 thanks to the efforts of the professor of botany Ivan Shikhovsky, who secured funding for its creation. The first trees on the site — oaks, limes, ash trees, horse chestnuts — were planted by the master gardener Pyotr Buk, and by 1843 the collection already included around fifty species of trees and shrubs. The collection grew rapidly: some specimens were donated by Count Fyodor Uvarov, others came from the Imperial Botanical Garden. A significant contribution to the expansion and development of the grounds was made by the botanist Andrei Beketov, who in the 1860s secured an increase in the garden's area and organised systematic scholarly work with the collections.

Today plants are kept both in open ground and in three greenhouses, which hold conifers, cacti and other succulents, aquatic and marsh plants, and rare and protected species of local flora. Separate collections are devoted to the subtropical flora of Europe, South-East Asia, Australia and Oceania, as well as North and South America; the tropical section grows large palms and a variety of ferns. In the open part of the garden an old arboretum survives, with some trees dating back to plantings of the nineteenth century that still grow in the courtyard of the university building.

Since 1935 the garden has held the status of a monument of history, culture and landscape gardening art, and is under state protection. During the Siege of Leningrad, university staff, despite hunger and the hardships of wartime, continued to tend the collections, and a significant part of the plants was preserved. Today the garden holds the status of a specially protected natural territory of federal significance, serving simultaneously as both a botanical garden and an arboretum.

Since the summer of 2018 the garden has been closed to free public access — large-scale restoration and modernisation work is underway on its grounds, including the creation of a new seed department and an overall concept for developing the space. At the same time, the garden continues to fulfil its main educational function, remaining a base for classes and research for students and staff of the Faculty of Biology.

Hidden behind the façades of one of the oldest buildings in Russian university education, the St Petersburg State University Botanical Garden remains a living scientific collection and a green oasis in the very heart of Vasilyevsky Island — the result of nearly two centuries of unbroken work by several generations of botanists.