Exhibition Orangery of the Dnipro National University Botanical Garden (Ekspozytsiina oranzhereia)

The botanical garden of Dnipro's university was laid out in the early 1930s in the upper part of the city, on the high right bank of the Dnieper. Its founder and first director, Professor Oleksandr Reinhard, head of the plant physiology department, oversaw the first plantings; the university gives 1931 as the founding year, while Ukrainian Wikipedia dates the garden's creation to 1929 and its move to the present site to 1931. Attached to the university by a decree of 1933, the garden was declared a protected area in 1963 and recognised in 1996 as a natural site of national importance. Reinhard died in March 1945 and his student Anna Levytska carried on his work.

According to the garden's current director, it was Kateryna Syrovatko, head of the garden in the 1960s and 1970s, who had the orangery built together with the administrative buildings. The exhibition glasshouse came into use in 1975. The original design gave it a concave dome intended to collect rainwater. In 2008 a partial reconstruction replaced it with a dome of conventional convex shape; the garden says the change saved several large old palms, some of them decades older than the building itself.

The orangery has a total floor area of 700 m². It was originally topped by a concave, dished dome designed to gather rainwater, an unusual arrangement for a glasshouse. The 2008 reconstruction replaced the dish with a conventional convex dome, which raised the interior volume and gave the tall palms more room.

Inside, the space is divided on an ecological and geographical basis, with plants grouped according to their regions of origin. The garden currently describes a tropical department, a subtropical department and a small section for succulents, whereas an older university document speaks of four sections. The collection is the responsibility of the laboratory of tropical and subtropical plants, one of the garden's six laboratories, which conserves and enlarges it and acclimatises its plants to the steppe country of the Dnieper.

The garden now puts the collection at about 600 species; an older university document listed 1,270 species, varieties, forms and cultivars. Most of the plants come from Central and South America, southern and eastern Africa, Australia and New Zealand, the Mediterranean, Indonesia, India and Madagascar. Ancient lineages such as whisk ferns, spikemosses, ferns and cycads grow beside bananas, gingers and orchids, while araucarias, cryptomerias, cunninghamias, cypresses, sequoias and swamp cypresses represent the conifers.

Among the large specimens are a Canary Island date palm planted in 1926, other date palms, two livistonas and a butia palm. The fruit plants include avocado, mango, guava, olive, feijoa, loquat, Arabian coffee, citrus, papaya, fig, pomegranate, carob, tamarillo, vanilla and banana; mango, guava, coffee and feijoa bear fruit under glass. Loquats, bignonias, strelitzias and azaleas provide the flowering highlights.

The orangery stands in the middle of the university's botanical garden, which covers about 27 hectares in the upper part of Dnipro, west of Gagarin Avenue. The garden offers guided tours of the arboretum and the orangery, as well as occasional events such as those held for its 95th anniversary. Allow an hour for the glasshouse and more for the arboretum, with over four hundred species of trees and shrubs, and for the outdoor collections of flowering plants. Being heated, the glasshouse can be visited in any season.