Gardens of Saint Petersburg

The Summer Garden, and the designer always left out

Laid out in 1704 as Peter's summer residence — not a public park, and with kitchen and fruit gardens as well as parterres. Older accounts credit the design vaguely to "one of the many Italian architects invited by Tsar Peter", which skips the man who began it and most of those who followed.

• Ivan Matveev, also called Ugryumov, led the earliest works from 1704 to 1707, setting the grid of alleys and beginning the fountains, drainage and planting. He died in 1707 and is the name popular accounts omit.
• Jan Roosen, a Dutch gardener, arrived in 1712 and ran all the garden work until 1726, making the first known plan.
• Jean-Baptiste Le Blond drew a new plan in 1717, detailing the parterres and boskets; he died two years later.
• Mikhail Zemtsov completed the boskets and grotto interiors from 1723.
• Domenico Trezzini built the Summer Palace; Andreas Schlüter and Niccolò Michetti worked on the grotto, Rastrelli on an amphitheatre of 1732.

Older accounts say the garden was designed so that Peter could take a leisurely stroll, and that is fair enough as far as it goes. On public access: Elizabeth first admitted visitors during her absences from the city, from 25 May 1752 on Sundays and holidays, extended to Thursdays in 1755 and restricted again in 1756. General public access came only in the first half of the nineteenth century.

The flood of 1777, which is the hinge of the whole story

Older accounts have the garden growing "over the ensuing decades to encompass rare flowers, fountains, sculpture and lush greenery", as though nothing interrupted it. Something did.

A severe flood with hurricane-force wind in 1777 destroyed the fountain system, damaged the grotto and killed many trees. Rather than repair it, the authorities filled in the harbour basin beside the Summer Palace, the Transverse Canal and the Oval Pond; the grotto was destroyed and the galleries, gazebos and aviaries dismantled. Catherine II then had the remaining pavilions, orangeries and follies taken down, stopped the topiary and removed the covered green corridors. The regular Baroque garden gave way to a landscape one. What survived was the alley grid, the Karpiev Pond, the Swan Canal and the marble sculpture.

That matters because of what happened two hundred and thirty years later.

The restoration of 2009 to 2012

The garden passed to the State Russian Museum in 2004. The sculptures were withdrawn from public view in May 2007 after vandalism; works began in June 2009; and the garden reopened on 27 May 2012, the city's founding day, at a reported cost of some 2.7 billion roubles.

What was built, on the museum's own account, was substantially the garden of Peter's own time:

• the plan of the first Summer Garden recreated with enclosed boskets — the French bosket, the Menagerie Pond, the Cross-shaped Promenade, the Bird Yard
• eight Petrine fountains rebuilt on their original foundations, fed by pumps rather than by gravity, with one excavated jet preserved under a glass pavilion as an exhibit
• the Small Orangery rebuilt on its former site, and a new Dovecote pavilion housing an archaeology display
• 12,600 limes grown in Germany planted as clipped espalier hedging on timber trellis, about three metres high in the parade section
• the Neva railing returned to its historic line, and 84 sculptures with 117 pedestals restored

It was publicly and professionally contested, by named people, on stated grounds. Alexander Margolis of the city's heritage society and Mikhail Milchik wrote jointly to the culture minister on behalf of that society and of ICOMOS; Sergei Gorbatenko, who chaired the city's ICOMOS committee, called the result "a kind of Disneyland" and a "cocktail of eras". Their arguments were that this was reconstruction rather than restoration; that it privileged a single period and discarded some two and a half centuries of later history, contrary to the Florence Charter; that nineteen of twenty-seven structures were to be rebuilt from scratch, several without firm evidence; that the new boskets would enclose the Krylov monument of 1855 in an eighteenth-century green frame; and — the legal point — that the garden is a federal monument, on which the law permits restoration but not reconstruction.

The museum's answer was that recreated elements were built from analogues and matching geometry, that new work was deliberately made distinguishable from old, that several proposed features were dropped on archaeological grounds, and that the scheme did not target a single year but set out to produce a garden of the twenty-first century.

One charge against the project does not stand, and it is worth retiring. The mature trees were not lost. Of 1,817 trees surveyed, 1,560 were retained; 126 were felled in 2009 and 2010 — under seven per cent — most of them for disease, with a further forty-odd elms removed for Dutch elm disease, and the stand's overall condition improved. What changed was not the trees but the space: open shaded alleys became paths flanked by trellis. That is the real substance of the objection, and the architecture critic Maria Elkina put it well in 2023, writing that a landscape park for unhurried walking had become an attraction for undemanding visitors.

Nothing has been reversed. The 2012 scheme stands, the copies are in the garden and the originals are indoors.

The statues are not marble, and not the originals

This is the correction that matters most to anyone going to look.

The marbles — some ninety statues, busts and groups, brought from Italy in the eighteenth century, with Pietro Baratta the one securely named master — were moved out between 17 June and 20 August 2009, to the Mikhailovsky (Engineers') Castle and to restoration workshops. Copies were made in 2009 to 2011 and installed in the garden in the summer of 2011.

The copies are polymer concrete — roughly four-fifths marble crumb to one-fifth polyester resin. So "marble statues" is wrong twice: they are replicas, and they are not marble.

One original is still outdoors. The group Peace and Victory, an allegory of the Peace of Nystad by Baratta, in Carrara marble, stands on the north front of the Summer Palace; it was neither restored nor copied. It is cased up every winter and uncovered every spring, in wooden cases to a design by Demut-Malinovsky of 1826.

The 2009 removal was the second evacuation and the first permanent one. In June to August 1941 eighty marbles were taken down and buried in pits beside their own plinths, with Peace and Victory left in place behind shields and sandbags; they came back between 1945 and 1952.

Two other objects deserve naming. The Krylov monument is by Pyotr Klodt, who won the competition in 1848, and was unveiled on 12 May 1855 — the first monument in Russia to a writer. And the Porphyry Vase was a gift from the King of Sweden to Nicholas I, made at Älvdalen in five horizontal sections, 4.85 metres tall with its pedestal, installed on 10 September 1839. It cracked in January 2008 and then broke apart, was restored during the reconstruction, and stands where it did.

The pavilions, which do not serve refreshments

Older accounts recommend "the outstanding brew from the Coffee House or Tea House, built in 1826 and 1827". The dates and architects are right; the recommendation is not.

The Coffee House is by Carlo Rossi, 1826, built on the site and partly on the foundations and walls of the half-ruined Grotto, with stucco by Demut-Malinovsky. It takes its name from an Italian confectioner called Piazza who leased a café there soon after it opened. It is now an exhibition pavilion run by the museum.

The Tea House is by Ludwig Charlemagne, 1827: a timber log pavilion boarded over to imitate stone, two rooms joined by a colonnade whose open centre served as a rain shelter. It is also a museum pavilion rather than a tea room.

The Summer Palace nearby is by Domenico Trezzini, built in the 1710s, and older accounts are right that it has two storeys: Peter's below, the women's half above for Catherine I, the children and the ladies-in-waiting. It has been an independent museum since 1934, and after a long and difficult campaign begun in late 2014 — the building was in catastrophic condition — it was restored and reopened in 2018.

Two more things older accounts miss. The cast-iron railing on the Neva side, one of the celebrated pieces of ironwork in Europe, was begun in 1770 and finished in 1784 to Yury Felten's design, with Pyotr Yegorov. And a chapel once stood near the main gates, built where Dmitry Karakozov fired at Alexander II on 4 April 1866, with a section of the railing cut away for it; it was dismantled in 1931 and the railing restored to its original form.

One peculiarity, which is genuine and unusual: the Summer and Mikhailovsky gardens close for the whole of April each year to dry out, because the ground is waterlogged, and both close on Tuesdays, when the sculptures are washed with distilled water.

The Tauride Garden, and four corrections about Potemkin

Older accounts say the garden "was created from 1783-1789" on land granted to "the General" as a reward for "conquering" Crimea. Every part of that wants adjusting.

• 1783–89 are the dates of the palace, by Ivan Starov. The garden was made in two campaigns: the eastern part from 1783, when the pond and canals were dug and the spoil heaped into turfed hills, with some 23,000 trees planted, many imported from England; and the western part between 1792 and 1796, as an English landscape park.
• Crimea was annexed by manifesto on 8 April 1783, not conquered in battle.
• Potemkin's title, Prince of Tauris, was granted on 19 June 1787 — four years after the annexation, not as an immediate reward.
• He was not "the General" but Governor-General of Novorossia from 1776 and a Field Marshal.

The designer was the English gardener William Gould, who laid out the park and stayed on to run it, reusing excavated spoil for hills and islands; the buildings — the Gardener's House of 1793–94, the greenhouses, the bridges, and the "Admiralty" boathouse pavilion on the Great Pond — are by the architect Fyodor Volkov.

Two pieces of engineering here are better than anything older accounts mention. Ivan Kulibin built a bridge to the Great Island in 1793 that was a one-tenth-scale model of his unbuilt single-span bridge over the Neva; it was taken down in 1816. And in 1793–94 two metal-span footbridges made at the Sestroretsk arms factory became the first metal-span crossings in the city.

On public access, older accounts give 1866. Most sources give 1861, by imperial order, with the orangery and fruit garden excluded; 1866 appears in some accounts and the question is genuinely unsettled. The ice skating is real — residents skated on the ponds and used ice slides, and a restaurant ran in the Admiralty pavilion in the 1860s. But the "artist exhibitions" are a misunderstanding: the exhibition building here was put up by the Imperial Russian Horticultural Society between 1910 and 1914, for horticultural shows. It later became a garage, and then Leningrad's first panoramic cinema, opening on 7 November 1958.

In the siege the garden took 43 high-explosive bombs and many incendiaries, was used to train recruits before they went to the front and to repair vehicles coming back along the Road of Life, and on 5 November 1941 received the wreckage of a German aircraft rammed by the pilot Alexei Sevastyanov. Immediately after the siege parts of it were turned over to vegetable plots for children's hospitals.

Older accounts say the gardens were then "fully restored" and look much as they always have. They were not, quite. Post-war work added rinks, a boat station and a stage; a monument to the young heroes of the defence of Leningrad went up in 1962; neglect in the 1980s left the ponds polluted; restoration resumed in 1999 and again for the city's tercentenary. Then, although the ensemble is a monument of federal significance inside the World Heritage inscription, the city approved a schedule of "lacunae" in 2004 — exception zones excluding land from the protection regime — which is how an ice arena came to open in the grounds in 2007. The "Boy with a Duck" fountain was stolen in September 2008.

It was never called the Young Pioneers' Park, as is sometimes said. It was the Park of Culture and Rest named after the First Five-Year Plan, then the City Children's Park, before the historic name came back; locals went on calling it the Tauride Garden throughout. It is now a city park of 21.1 hectares, and the Tauride Palace has housed the CIS Interparliamentary Assembly since 1992.

The Mikhailovsky Garden, which is both French and English

Older accounts call this "this formal French garden" in one sentence and say the centre is "modelled after several English gardens" in another. The two are not a contradiction so much as a muddle of a real and unusual fact: the garden is a hybrid, and that is what makes it a rare monument of landscape design.

The sequence matters. A garden was laid out here in 1713 around Catherine I's wooden summer palace, the Golden Chambers, and was known as the Tsaritsyn Garden and later the Third Summer Garden. Under Elizabeth, Rastrelli gave it a regular layout in 1743–45 — cross alleys, clipped trees, parterres, statues, decorative ponds and a labyrinth. Then Carlo Rossi remodelled the whole thing in 1823–25, with Adam Menelas, the painter Ivanov and the garden master Bush: the geometric ponds were filled in and the Baroque plan buried under an English landscape park.

So what reads as "French" today is the regular parterre immediately against the palace front, the formal frame to the house, with the landscape park beyond. Both are Rossi's, over the remains of a Baroque garden. The Mikhailovsky Palace itself is Rossi's too, 1819–25, for Grand Duke Mikhail Pavlovich, and now holds the main collection of the Russian Museum.

The garden's best building goes unmentioned in older accounts. The Pavilion-Pier of 1825, on the Moika bank, is a stone pavilion with a through Doric colonnade, a cast-iron railing and two granite descents to the water. It stands where the Golden Chambers had been. Rossi meant to build two and built one, so his own composition is asymmetrical — and it is now the one place among these gardens where older accounts' advice about a cup of something would actually work, since it houses a café.

The Tree of Freedom, which really existed

Older accounts mention, beside the Empire-style pavilion, "the Tree of Freedom, a wooden sculpture carved from an old oak tree". This looks like invention and is not. It was real, and it is gone.

Derevo svobody — the Tree of Freedom — was carved in 1929 by the sculptor A. P. Soloviev from a dead oak standing in the garden, in three registers representing serfdom, the struggle against the oppressors, and the triumph of justice. It stood in front of Rossi's pavilion, not in the north-east corner as older accounts place it, and beside it from 1959 stood a bust of the sculptor Shubin.

Both were removed during the garden's restoration of 2002 to 2004, when the Russian Museum — which took the garden over in 1999 — returned it towards Rossi's intended character. In their place went a bust of Rossi and copies of nineteenth-century busts of the painters Bryullov and Ivanov. So older accounts, written at about that moment, were describing a Soviet wooden monument that had just been taken out, on the site of Catherine I's Golden Chambers. Where the sculpture went is not recorded.

The railing on the church side, and a festival that has stopped

The Church of the Saviour on the Spilled Blood, begun in 1883, took about 0.8 hectares off the garden on the canal side. The celebrated railing between the two is often attributed to Rossi and is not his: it is by Alfred Parland, the church's architect, made between 1903 and 1907 in Art Nouveau, and it is wrought iron rather than cast, forged at the Karl Winkler works, running some two hundred and fifty metres with its plant ornament echoing the church's interior. Some reference books credit the design instead to Ernst Kverfeldt, so the attribution is to Parland rather than settled on him.

One last correction, for anyone planning around it. The Imperial Gardens of Russia festival ran here annually from 2008, each year on a theme, under the patronage of a British royal foundation and with an international jury. The last documented edition was the eleventh, in June 2018, and it was held in the Summer Garden rather than here. No edition has been recorded since, and the festival should not be described as an annual fixture.