Žiemos sodas, Winter Garden of the Kretinga Museum

Count Juozapas Tiškevičius (Tyszkiewicz in Polish) made Kretinga his family seat and thoroughly remodelled the palace built by the Zubovs. Around 1875 he decided to join two separate buildings with a glass structure and fit it out as an orangery, then a fashionable feature of grand houses. The interior and planting were entrusted to Johann Larass, a Prussian landscape architect whom the museum ranks among the best of the later nineteenth century; the broadcaster LRT dates his design to 1880. In 1891 the estate passed to the count's son Aleksandras.

Damaged by fire in 1915, the winter garden was put back in order after the First World War. In 1940, under Soviet occupation, it became a hospital and its plants were destroyed; it was later used as stables, a storeroom, a gym and a plain greenhouse. Its reconstruction was launched by the management of the Kretinga agricultural technical school to designs by the architects Aldona Švabauskienė, Jonas Zibolis and Juozas Lapinskas. LRT places the work between 1972 and 1988, the museum in the 1980s and early 1990s. Two teachers, Vida Mockevičienė and Viktorija Vėžauskaitė, put in the first plants.

In 1991 a decree of the Lithuanian government gave the palace and its winter garden to the Kretinga Museum (Wikipedia says 1992). From 2021 to summer 2023 a renovation costing 716,000 euros, paid for by the national heritage programme and the district municipality, renewed all the glazing and the frame.

The winter garden is a large glazed hall set between two buildings of the palace, which it ties together into a single complex. Inside, the space originally rose over three levels. Its first decoration combined walls encrusted with coral, a waterfall, small pools linked by channels and crossed by footbridges, two fountains and ornamental fish, all lit by three electric arc lamps. A stretch of the historic coral-covered wall survives and now supports climbing plants.

The present floor area is almost 700 m². The work completed in 2023 by the restoration firm Pamario restauratorius replaced every pane of glass, the aluminium load-bearing structures of the roof and walls and the roof covering, with part of the job carried out 15 to 16 metres above the ground. According to LRT, the interior has been much brighter since then, and growing conditions have improved.

In the Tiškevičius era the winter garden held fan palms, banana plants, cacti, orange and bay trees and a large araucaria. Today it grows around 170 species. The most notable specimens include a rubber plant (Ficus elastica) that has been thriving for some four decades and a Norfolk Island pine (Araucaria heterophylla).

Monsteras and tetrastigmas climb the historic coral-decorated wall, while palms, birds of paradise (Strelitzia), orchids, hibiscus and anthuriums fill out the collection. Pomegranates and dwarf bananas bear fruit every year, and a colony of koi carp lives in the pools.

The winter garden is part of the Kretinga Museum, housed in the former Tiškevičius palace in the north of the town at Vilniaus gatvė 20. An hour is enough to see it at an easy pace. Concerts, art events, educational workshops and wedding ceremonies take place there throughout the year.

A visit carries on naturally into the estate park, an English-style landscape garden laid out in the early nineteenth century and later enriched by the Tiškevičius family, with 23 native and 67 introduced species recorded. The palace has been protected as a state monument since 1958.