St Petersburg’s Botanical Garden: From Medicinal Plants to Collaborative Research

The garden’s predecessor was a medicinal garden established on an island in the Neva under Peter I. Its first purpose was to supply pharmaceutical plants, especially for the army and navy. The wet, low-lying site was distant from the contemporary city center, and its island later became known as Apothecary Island. Medicinal production gradually combined with botanical collecting and classification.

Histories commonly give either 1713 or 1714 for its beginning. Drawing on early accounts, botanist Gennady Firsov notes that a local inventory in December 1713 already recorded allocation of land. Another record, dated 11 February 1714, concerns enclosing the garden and providing housing for pharmaceutical personnel. The years preserve separate land and construction stages in its organization.

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The garden required dedicated pharmaceutical personnel to harvest, process and dry plants for dispensaries. The plants also served as teaching material. Natural-history expeditions around Russia brought specimens into the garden, gradually extending the range that could be compared and cultivated beyond local medicinal herbs.

German botanist Johann Georg Siegesbeck arrived in Russia in 1735. Alongside managing the naval hospital, he was assigned the medical garden and teaching. Instructions recounted by Firsov included firewood, candles, vegetable plots, hayfields and service personnel, with a rowboat and rowers for summer travel. Scholarly work depended on these provisions and transport arrangements as well as appointment of a botanist.

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Siegesbeck published a catalogue of the garden’s plants in 1736. Historical research records 921 units in a contemporary inventory of African and other exotic plants in three wooden greenhouses, including aloes, citrus, figs and passionflowers. Those numbers concern greenhouse collections. Catalogues and organized storage made plants identifiable, retrievable and exchangeable.

Severe cold limited the work. Greenhouses protected plants unable to tolerate outdoor temperatures in the eighteenth century. By the early nineteenth century, inadequate funding, aging buildings and the burden on part-time management had accumulated. Elena Arnautova’s study records the loss of 180 plants to freezing in 1818. After successful collection, heating and maintenance still determined whether material remained available for research.

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In 1823, Interior Minister Viktor Kochubey proposed reorganization to Alexander I and obtained approval. The former medical garden became organized as the Imperial Botanical Garden. Friedrich Ernst Ludwig von Fischer, previously responsible for the Gorenki garden near Moscow, became director; his Russian name was Fyodor Bogdanovich Fischer.

The new arrangements allocated dedicated funds for living plants, seeds, herbarium specimens, housing and greenhouses. Brick greenhouse construction began in 1823, with the main part complete late the following year and the last greenhouse delayed until 1826. Connected buildings allowed staff to change rooms without passing through the cold outdoors, making layout part of protecting collections and maintaining work.

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The reorganized establishment linked research with care through distinct responsibilities. Alongside the director and assistants were personnel combining scientific secretarial, library and collection duties, a head gardener, twelve gardening assistants, twelve apprentices, clerical staff and an artist. Professional botanical work was initially concentrated in the director, leaving horticultural and record staff much of the work that kept material usable.

Fischer expanded collections through international correspondence and garden contacts. Nature’s 1913 retrospective particularly notes his long correspondence with British botanist William Hooker. The garden funded overseas collecting and from 1834 issued catalogues of seeds available for exchange. These also included short research reports. Collection, cultivation, naming and exchange gradually formed a collaborative process between institutions.

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By the 1913 celebrations the garden had a herbarium, museum, library, seed-testing and plant-pathology departments. Nature’s report describes seeds collected on site, obtained on expeditions, exchanged or purchased, and Asian expedition collections entering the herbarium. A new herbarium and library building had been completed. Living material, voucher specimens and literature supported later researchers in checking earlier work.

The garden added Peter the Great’s name that year. Commemoration connected its medicinal beginnings with a research institution built through long-term investment in personnel, buildings and collection practices. Its history shows how sustained care and transferable records support the accumulation of botanical knowledge.

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