Cactus Orangery, Nikitsky Botanical Garden (Kaktusovaya oranzhereya)

The garden owes its existence to a decree signed in Saint Petersburg by Emperor Alexander I in June 1811, establishing a state botanical garden in Crimea; the 31-year-old botanist Christian Steven was appointed director in March 1812, and the first planting took place that September. Succulents came early: according to the garden, hardy species arrived from 1812 onwards from China, the Mediterranean and the dry regions of North America, and from 1824 opuntias, agaves and yuccas were planted outdoors.

The collection under glass took shape much later: it was begun in the 1960s and, in the early 1970s, a separate 200 m² glasshouse was built to hold and propagate it. In 1986 Gennady Kulikov introduced two agave species. The garden's landscape design workshop presented a project for a display orangery in 1989; it was built in 1995 and opened in 1996, the same year an open-air succulent garden was laid out on its south terrace.

In the 1990s, when the coal used to heat the orangery and the staff housing ran out, Nikolai Opanasenko, head of the agroecology department, signed a research contract with the Pavlogradugol mining association on neutralising and greening the spoil heaps of Pavlohrad; paid in wagonloads of coal, the garden saved its collection. The peninsula has been occupied by Russia since 2014: in April 2014 the garden's property, which belonged to Ukraine's National Academy of Agrarian Sciences, was transferred to an enterprise created by the authorities installed in Crimea. The orangery celebrated its 25th anniversary in August 2021.

The orangery is a covered, glazed pavilion in which the microclimate the plants need is maintained. It stands in the lower part of the garden, on the edge of Montedor Park, close to the bamboo grove and the Paradise Garden. The design came from the garden's own landscape design workshop; no architect is named in the sources consulted. According to the garden, the main part of the collection covers nearly 1,000 m², and in the 1990s the orangery was heated with coal.

The interior is laid out on an ecological and geographical principle. A "Mexican hill", which the garden calls the orangery's most distinctive feature; bromeliads are planted beside a pool, and about 500 Old World plants, each labelled, fill the central benches. The collection's curator stresses the role of small architectural features, colour and stylistic choices in giving each section its own character. To the south, a 1,240 m² terrace has held an open-air succulent garden since 1996.

The garden describes its holding as one of the largest succulent collections in Russia and Europe: about 1,100 species, forms and varieties, including more than 600 cactus species in 118 genera and some 500 other succulents in 67 genera and 17 families. Under glass, the orangery shows 12,200 specimens of 985 taxa from twelve families and 106 genera, native to the Americas, the West Indies, Africa and Madagascar; cacti form the core with 619 taxa. There were 733 taxa in 2015.

Highlights singled out by the garden include Pereskia aculeata, a leafy cactus of tropical forests trained as a climber, with strongly scented yellow flowers; a yucca about forty years old that towers over the Mexican hill and sets fruit after hand pollination; agaves; astrophytums; and a branching Mexican cactus 4.5 metres tall. Outdoors, more than 2,300 plants from five families fill the south terrace. Succulents propagated on site are offered for sale.

The garden stretches for about a kilometre along the Black Sea at Nikita, near Yalta, and climbs to 200 metres up the slope. The orangery is part of a combined circuit with Montedor Park and the Paradise Garden, reached through its own entrance opposite the lower colonnade, next to the bus stop. An hour is enough for this sector; the Upper and Lower Parks and the Cape Martyan reserve need more time. Every autumn the garden holds a chrysanthemum ball, as well as shows of tulips, irises, daylilies, clematis and roses. The peninsula has been occupied by Russia since 2014, and the French foreign ministry formally advises against all travel to Ukraine.