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The Hermitage Gardens The outdoor territory of the State Hermitage's Repository in Staraya Derevnia is gradually, like the entire restoration and storage complex, is becoming an open storage area. An unusual part of the museum's stocks is the rare trees, collections of different kinds of plants and a sort of copy of the Hanging Garden of the Small Hermitage that preserves the layout that it had in the last quarter of the 20th century. The transfer of plants from the Hanging Garden to the territory of the Repository took place in late autumn 2004 due to the reconstruction of the garden. The replanting of trees and shrubs aged 30 years is a complicated and even risky business. In order to reduce the stress that the plants would inevitably undergo, each was marked while still in the Hanging Garden with an indication of its north-south direction, so that it could be replanted with the same orientation. Thanks to attentive care all the plants survived the move and the popular "Hermitage lilac from the Hanging Garden" blossomed on the territory of the Repository in 2006. Together with the Hanging Garden the collection of bulbs (narcissi, tulips, hyacinths, fritillaria, muscari) presented to the Hermitage for St Petersburg's tercentenary was also moved. A special flowerbed located alongside the block "B" was designed for this collection. The harsh winter of 2005-06, when the city suffered considerable losses to the quantity and variety of its flora, inevitably affected this collection too. Still they managed to preserve all the different kinds of flowers that grew in the Hanging Garden from 2003 and to add new varieties of narcissi and tulips in the autumn of 2006. Since 2003 the territory of the Repository has been able to boast some very ancient plant residents - Ginkgo biloba, graceful trees that were common in the world back in the Mesozoic era and have miraculously survived to the present day. In 2006 the ginkgoes were planted out permanently in the soil. Prior to that the trees were put out on the lawn only in summer and moved for the winter to the Botanical Garden of St Petersburg State University. In 2006 work was completed on the arboretum project for the "Hermitage" pedestrian area on the Repository territory (designed by M.Ye. Dubrovskaya, a researcher in the Department for the History and Restoration of Architectural Monuments). The concept is based on the idea of combining different collections of plants. There will be a large maple collection; an "architectural forms and florescence" collection containing different sorts of potentilla and trees with "architecturally" shaped crowns; a collection of rhododendrons (nine varieties), selected in such a way that the flowering season of these attractive plants will last up to two months. |
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