Tauride Garden

In the Peski district, among blocks built up in the century before last with apartment houses, spreads a landscape park of more than twenty-one hectares — one of the first English-style gardens in the city, bounded on its perimeter by four streets of the historic district. Its name is linked to the most serene Prince Grigory Potemkin-Tavrichesky, who received this land together with the neighbouring palace for the annexation of Crimea — ancient Taurida — to Russia. The garden and the palace originally formed a single estate complex.

The park was laid out at the same time as the palace was built, in 1783–1790, to a plan by the architect Ivan Starov and the garden master William Gould. On the site of the Samoroyka stream, which once flowed here, a complex hydraulic system of two ponds was created, linked by channels and fed with water from the Ligovsky Canal; sterlet and swans were released into the water. Earth excavated in digging the ponds was piled up into viewing hills, and the banks were partly faced with stone. For a long time the garden remained part of the court's household and was closed to outsiders; only in the second half of the nineteenth century was it opened to the general public.

Two islands were arranged on the large pond, and bridges were thrown across the channels, including one that served as a working model for the future crossing of the Neva designed by the engineer Ivan Kulibin. A pavilion called the "Admiralty" was built to store boats, and a hothouse grew exotic fruit trees. In 1910 the "Boy with a Duck" fountain was installed in the garden. Among the old trees, preserved mainly along the boundaries of the grounds, oaks predominate, with some centuries-old lindens and larches also found.

In 1815 one of the first steamships in Russia was tested on the pond. The garden has more than once served as a setting for literary works — episodes of Korney Chukovsky's fairy tale "Moidodyr" and Nikolai Gogol's story "The Nose" unfold here, and it was written about by Alexander Kushner and Daniil Kharms. The flood of 1924 and the Siege of Leningrad inflicted heavy damage on the park; during the Soviet years it changed its name several times, until its historic name was restored in 1975.

The first post-war restoration was completed in 1958, and a second was carried out at the turn of 1997–2001. Over the decades monuments appeared here to the young pioneer-heroes, to Pyotr Tchaikovsky and to Sergei Yesenin. Today Tauride Garden remains a popular place for city residents to relax and one of the filming locations for St Petersburg cinema.

Having preserved the historic layout of its ponds and avenues, Tauride Garden displays a rare example, for the city centre, of late-eighteenth-century landscape park art, and together with the palace of the same name shapes the appearance of the entire Peski quarter.