Winter Garden and Orangery of the Palace of Pioneers (Vorobyovy Gory)

Moscow's Palace of Pioneers was built from 1958 to 1962 on the hills then named after Lenin, by a team of young architects (V. Egerev, V. Kubasov, F. Novikov and Igor Pokrovsky, joined by B. Paluy and M. Khazhakyan) led by Pokrovsky; it opened on 1 June 1962 in the presence of Nikita Khrushchev. The botanical garden was born beside it, on the plots next to the fourth building: a text by former staff treats 1 June 1962 as its founding date, while the passport of the Council of Botanical Gardens of Russia and the official website give 1964. Until the late 1980s pupils and instructors brought back plants from all over the Soviet Union; the crisis of the 1990s impoverished the collections. After the Centre for Ecological Education was created in 2003, a reconstruction project was launched in 2004; the garden is now a member of the Council of Botanical Gardens of Russia and of BGCI.

The Palace, listed as a regional monument, was restored in 2023. Ahead of the works, the plants of the winter garden and the orangery were dug up, according to an article of March 2022, and entrusted to the Tsitsin Main Botanical Garden and to the orangery of the Trubetskoy estate in Khamovniki. Three skylights, whose glass had disappeared and which had been given plastic infill during a 1980s refit, were recreated from the archives; the city presented them as finished in February 2024. According to the head of the complex, about 70% of the plants had come back by October 2023. The Russian Wikipedia article states, without a source, that the winter garden was entirely destroyed during the works; the city, the management and the garden's own website say instead that it was restored.

The Palace consists of asymmetrical pavilions hung off a common gallery, with largely glazed walls. The winter garden fills the vestibule of the main building, covered by three skylights 8 m in diameter. Each dome is designed as a net of triangles inscribed in a sphere, a simple but rigid solution according to the city; the Russian Wikipedia article compares the domes to Richard Buckminster Fuller's, which entered the project after the American exhibition at Sokolniki in 1959. The original glazing was acrylic glass on a frame of paired small-profile angles, erected from base to top without scaffolding.

In 2023-2024, new domes replacing those of the 1980s, with an aluminium frame and triangular toughened-glass panes, which let through more light and ultraviolet for the plants, were assembled in a workshop, taken apart for transport and put together again on site by twenty specialists per dome. They restore the open-sky effect the architects wanted.

The botanical garden's orangery is a sloping-roofed pavilion with large glazed panels on a metal frame, attached to building 4; captions of 2015 photographs on Wikimedia Commons call that building the "circles building with orangery and 'Earth' panel". OpenStreetMap traces its footprint at about 160 m². The official website describes it under a transparent ceiling.

Before the works, the garden's website describes in the winter garden a banana beside a pond, a pandanus on stilt roots, koi carp and a giant Caryota palm (Caryota gigas). After the restoration, the head of the complex said in October 2023 that about 70% of the plants had returned from the botanical garden where they had been staying, along with new specimens, including a 5 m araucaria given to replace one that had grown too tall for the skylight; the pond had received water hyacinth and was still waiting for its fish.

The tropical orangery has palms, tillandsias, a gardenia (Gardenia jasminoides) and epiphytic orchids, with a narrow path through the fronds. The passport of the Council of Botanical Gardens gives about 4,800 taxa for the whole garden, more than 2,000 of them under cover. Outdoors, the garden claims the largest collection of magnolias in Russia.

The winter garden is in the vestibule of building 1, at the entrance to the Palace on Kosygina Street, and the orangery on the park side, near building 4; the winter garden was the meeting point for the botanical garden tours held in 2024. Access is with a guide: the Council of Botanical Gardens passport mentions group visits, and since April 2026 the Palace has run a general tour, open to all, that passes the mosaic façade, the winter garden and the Hall of a Hundred Lanterns. The open-air "Botanical Adventures" tours continue until 1 November 2026. The site combines with the Parade Square and the Vorobyovy pond, rehabilitated in 2023.