Orangeries of the Saint Petersburg State University Botanical Garden (Botanichesky Sad SPbGU)

The university's botany department, created in 1823, at first made do with a small botanical plot in front of the Twelve Collegia building. Wikipedia dates the garden's foundation to 1841 and Professor I. O. Shikhovsky, while other accounts point to the 1830s. A teaching orangery was proposed in 1864 by Professor Andrei Beketov, and in 1867, at the university council's request, the war minister Dmitry Milyutin handed over about two hectares behind the courtyard wall, land that had once belonged to the Menshikov estate.

Built between 1867 and 1870 under Beketov's direction, the garden was inspected on 24 August 1870 by a commission that included the architect Ivan Gornostayev and the rector Karl Kessler. It comprised a three-storey stone teaching building and an orangery in three sections, stocked with some 3,000 plants at the opening. By 1895 about 2,500 species of glasshouse plants were grown.

The Second World War hit the garden hard. Through bombing and the famine of the siege the staff kept part of the collections alive, and director D. M. Zalessky later rebuilt them. A small orangery followed in 1961, then the great palm house, dated 1972 by the university library and 1974 by the press. The garden has been regarded as a cultural monument since 1935. Restoration work, first funded by donations to the university endowment, began in summer 2018; in 2020 the management planned to replace a dilapidated old glasshouse with a new 200 m² orangery.

None of the sources consulted names the designers of the present glasshouses. The orangery of 1870 had three sections: a cool house for the local flora and two warm houses for tropical plants. The complex then grew by successive additions rather than to a single plan.

The great palm house, put up in the centre of the garden in the 1970s, is described as the tallest palm house in the city, although no height is given. After the 1974 enlargement the area under glass is said to have reached 1,100 m²; other sources speak of three orangeries totalling 1,300 m². A further glasshouse is attached to the two-storey seed laboratory in the north-west of the site, and other houses stand in the south-east. According to a city guide, the garden now runs five display houses and four collection houses, the latter kept for research and teaching.

The garden reports more than 4,600 species, about 3,300 of them grown under glass and 1,300 outdoors. The glasshouses hold some 2,200 species and cultivars of tropical and subtropical plants, together with conifers, cacti, succulents and other rarities.

Older figures trace the collection's ups and downs: around 1,000 species in 1869, nearly 2,500 glasshouse species in 1895, and just over 800 species under glass in 1950, after the war. The great palm house keeps survivors from that time, as two palms and an Australian cycad came through the Siege of Leningrad. The garden is also a working ground for the biology faculty's students, which is why research collections sit alongside the display houses.

The garden lies at 7-9-11 Universitetskaya Embankment on Vasilyevsky Island, inside the university grounds; it should not be confused with the Peter the Great Botanical Garden on Aptekarsky Island. There is no free entry: visitors come in on a guided excursion, a workshop, or during open days and university events such as the annual 'University Seasons' festival.

Heated all year round, the glasshouses make a welcome outing in the Petersburg winter. A visit pairs naturally with the Twelve Collegia, the university's historic main building, which stands just in front of the garden.