Apothecary Garden

This guide to the Apothecary Garden in Moscow opens with a three-hundred-year story: that Peter the Great personally planted a spruce, a fir and a larch here in 1706, so ordinary Muscovites could tell the three conifers apart. It follows the sole survivor of those three trees through two centuries of unquestioned legend, including a lightning strike early last century that only seemed to confirm its royal pedigree. Stand close to the trunk as you listen, near where the garden's medicine once grew for Peter's own army.