Collections Orangery of the Botanical Garden of the Belarusian State Agricultural Academy (Gorki)

The botanical garden of the Belarusian State Agricultural Academy grew out of the Gory-Gorki agricultural school, opened in 1840 at Gorki in the Mogilev Region. A 2020 article by two of the garden's managers reports that the first works began when the school opened and that an orangery, created in 1841, served as the forerunner of the botanical garden; the garden itself was recognised as a separate unit of the agricultural institute in 1847. The official portal belarus.by confirms the lineage, saying the garden was "created on the basis of an orangery". The garden's birth date is 1840 in the Academy museum's document, on the district executive committee's website and in Wikidata; 1847 on belarus.by and in the Academy's own article of September 2026. Belarus.by also lists an orangery among the 35 buildings that appeared in the school's first years.

The institute closed in 1863 and the garden was neglected; restoration began after the institute reopened in 1919-1920 and continued through the 1920s. The hard winters of 1939-1940, then the war, brought heavy losses: the 2020 article says almost all the collections perished, and in 2026 the Academy speaks of a collection largely carried off by the Nazis, with a few isolated specimens surviving. Rebuilding of the collections resumed in 1950.

The present house dates from the end of that rebuilding period: according to the 2020 article, the collections greenhouse for tropical and subtropical plants (the "fondovaya oranzhereya") was built in 1978, under the head of the botany department and garden for 1974-1978. Between 2009 and 2011 a propagation house of 126 m² was brought into service.

The Academy museum's document (2021) says that, in the collections house, plants from tropical countries bloom and fruit summer and winter "under a glass roof". Russian calls it the "fondovaya oranzhereya", literally an orangery "of holdings", that is, of collections; the garden has a department of tropical and subtropical plants, one of five formed in the 2015 reorganisation.

Beside it, a propagation house of 126 m² ("razvodochnaya"), commissioned between 2009 and 2011, serves for reproducing plants. The district executive committee's website specifies that the orangery includes a "winter garden"; the 2020 article separately lists a "Zimniy sad" among the garden's thematic displays, next to a fragrance garden, a heather garden and a sensory garden, without giving its plan or dimensions.

The Academy museum's document names azaleas, palms, bananas, agaves, lemon trees and cacti growing under the glass roof. The garden's own presentation adds, for the winter garden, assorted tropical ferns, magnolias, oleanders, laurel, myrtle, feijoa, a hibiscus (Chinese rose), an aspidistra from Japan, a rex begonia from India, kalanchoes, monsteras, coleus, clivias, sansevierias, chlorophytums and sedges of the genus known in Russian as syt.

The figures cited are 350 species of tropical and subtropical plants in 75 families (the district executive committee's website, echoed by Wikipedia), 394 species and cultivars (a tourist page) and 435 species and cultivars (the 2020 article). The collections are topped up every year, notably from the Central Botanical Garden of the National Academy of Sciences of Belarus and from botanical gardens in Poland, Russia and Germany. In 2026 the garden's head describes a place where, in winter, "summer reigns" in the orangery.

The botanical garden lies on the north-eastern edge of Gorki, at 159 metres above sea level, with a small stream, the Kopylka, running through its centre. According to the district executive committee's website, the orangery can be visited only in a guided group, Monday is watering day and Friday is given to watering and chemical treatment of the plants; a group of up to fifteen people can be booked in advance. The 2020 article counts some 2,500 visitors and more than 150 guided tours a year.

The garden continues into the dendrarium, drawn up in the regular style in 1840 by the Italian architect Angelo Campioni and laid out on the ground from 1847 by Eduard Rego; it is a botanical natural monument of national rank, by decisions of 1963 and 2007 according to the 2020 article. The Academy campus has other notable buildings nearby, including constructivist buildings of the 1930s by the architect Georgy Lavrov, and an Academy museum.