Botanical Gardens of Peter the Great

This guide to the Botanical Gardens of Peter the Great in Saint Petersburg centers on the Great Palm Greenhouse, opened in 1899 as the tallest glasshouse in the world, and one particular southern fan palm planted there in 1937 that somehow lived through the nearly nine-hundred-day siege of Leningrad. It follows what happened to that tree decades later, once workers on ropes climbed into the dome in November 2022 to deal with a problem palms cannot solve on their own: they only grow up, never sideways. Look up at the glass dome as you walk beneath it to see how close the canopy now sits to the ceiling.