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Many local dwellers go to relax in the country's Main Botanical Garden, regarding it as an ordinary rest and recreation area where they can pick flowers for home and shrubs for their dachas, unaware that these are rare and protected species.

Many Muscovites know that the city has a Botanical Garden just because there is a metro station of the same name.

The easiest way to get to the Garden, however, is from metro stations VDNKh and Vladykino. And although the majority of citizens have been to the Garden at least once in their lifetime, few of them know its purposes and its distinctions from an ordinary park.

The Botanical Garden is, apart from everything else, a major scientific center. Its collections include 9,500 varieties of wild plants and 7,700 cultivars. Most of this botanical wealth is open for the public to see.

We asked Mikhail Romanov, Candidate of Biological Sciences, to take us on a small excursion through the Garden.

The Main Botanical Garden was founded on April 14, 1945 in commemoration of the 220th anniversary of the establishment of the Russian Academy of Sciences by Peter the Great. The Garden annually sends out expeditions to collect plant samples from all parts of the world. Formerly, such expeditions used to be sponsored by the state; today, they are financed by grants from various sources. The main goal of the expeditions is not to collect as many samples as possible, but to find out what plants can take root in our rather severe climate. This is a time-consuming and laborious work. For example, for 20 years attempts were made to grow a plane tree (or platan) in the Botanical Garden. The seeds sprouted, but the shoots perished. It was only in the 21st year that the experiment succeeded. Now there is a platan grove in the Garden's arboretum.

Nowadays, many summer rural residents - and some agronomists of the Moscow Region too - are "inventing a bicycle": By trial and error, they are selecting plants for growing in a Russian environment, unaware that scientists had spent a great deal of time and energy on research to establish which varieties would survive in our climate, and which ones wouldn't.

Mikhail Romanov, our guide on this excursion, recounts: "It happens that someone reads in a foreign publication about a variety of grapes which he thinks will best decorate his summer house front, unaware that the Botanical Garden's botanists had long studied and established eight frost-resistant varieties."

The Garden's arboretum boasts a vast and unique collection of living trees and shrubs. Among the fruit trees is Manchurian apricot, which grows and bears ripe fruits in the Moscow Region.

The Garden lacks workers. The overall number of employees have halved since 1991, mainly because most of them have quitted. Formerly, 64 persons worked on the 75-hectar arboretum; now, only two workers take care of that vast area. Therefore, scientists and agronomists have to do manual work in the arboretum in order to keep it in proper condition. However, there is too much work for them to do there. The trees, for example, need trimming every year for both decorative and sanitary purposes. That wasn't done for the last 15 years!

Over these past years, City Hall has provided workers from time to time to clean the Garden and mow the grass. This is purely voluntary aid on City Hall's part, for the Garden is on the books of the Russian Academy of Sciences. Students also help when they come to do their studies in the Botanical Garden. We found a group of girls - would-be landscape designers - weeding flowerbeds. They work here without pay, for the sake of seeing the trees they read about in books.

The Botanical Garden has not escaped the usual woes of Moscow parks. The neighborhood residents take the unique arboretum to be an ordinary park, and come here to drink beer and walk their dogs. Sometimes they even grill shashliks here, not to mention cycle and walk where rare plants grow. The Garden covers a vast area, and it's impossible to have the whole of it guarded.

Another problem - a very serious one - is theft. Speaking on the occasion of presenting a relict pine to the Botanical Garden, its director, Alexander Sergeyevich Demidov, noted that the Garden's collection of roses had dwindled from 2,200 to 1,600 varieties because of theft. The rosary is now closed to visitors, and the flowers have been transferred to a guarded area.

Thefts peaked in the early 1990s when local dwellers stole numerous flowers and shrubs for their dachas. The natural flora section, which displays the relief depictions and flora of various parts of the former Soviet Union, has suffered badly. The Caucasus section continues to lose shrubs to this day.

"I used to have tulips here," a female employee of the Garden complained to this reporter, pointing to a place where only dandelions sprouted from the soil.

The highlight of our trip was the greenhouse, which anyone can visit after signing up for an excursion. It contains many plants that the majority of Muscovites know only from books: baobab, upas, banana and coconut trees, feijoa, Paraguay tea, cocoa and coffee plants.

In the aquatic flora section, we saw the famous carnivorous plant called nepenthes. It grows on poor soil and has to compensate for the deficiency of nutrients by swallowing up insects. On each leaf, the plant has little cups containing a substance that resembles human gastric juice. Attracted by the smell of this substance, insects come and sit on the edge of the little cups, and slide into the sticky juice, where they are devoured and digested. No one brings insects to the nepenthes; a random fly is enough for it.

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