Historical Apple Gardens

In the XVII century, Kolomenskoe was a country residence of the Russian rulers. The Tsar and the Moscow royal court would move here for the summer - to stay, receive ambassadors and organize feasts. Kolomenskoe was made as comfortable resting place as possible, and gardens made its integral part.

In those days, any earthly garden was associated with Paradise and was designed to look like it. The gardens design was a personal true passion of Tsar Alexey, so the gardens at his country residence were arranged with particular devotion and love.

Three of the six gardens laid out at Kolomenskoe by the early XVIII century have come up to our days: Ascension, Dyakovo and Kazansky.

The Dyakovo Garden now differs very little from his three centuries-old counterpart. It neighbors on the Church of Beheading of St. John the Baptist and occupies even a larger area than in Tsar Alexey’s days – 10.2 hectares.

The Ascension (at that time also known as ‘Red’, i.e. ‘Beautiful’) Garden was laid out near the Savior Gate, by the Tsarevnas’ (Tsar’s daughters’) Tower windows. On its area there grew apples, pears, plum-trees, currant and raspberry. In the present-day garden you can see 800 apple-trees of various species. The original Ascension garden also could boast of useful southern plants, exotic flowers and fragrant herbs such as irises, white lilies, yellow lilies (day flowers), tansy, several species of carnations, crisp-leaved (a.k.a. German) mint, crisp-leaved peony etc. The fragrant herbs were given special attention in the XVII century gardening: their scent was associated with Paradise where all the human senses were believed to be delighted.

The old Kazansky Garden, with cherry and plum-trees, used to grow opposite the Tsar’s Tower, behind the Church of Our Lady of Kazan Icon. All the gardens were decorated with flowers such as irises, lilies, violets, daisies, chicory, peonies, gillyflowers, carnations and dog rose. Empress Catherine II, known for her passion for walks, gave a personal order to make the garden her promenade area with a central alley (which she called ‘perschpektive’ in a German manner). This alley, still surviving, is framed with ‘thin-branched’ and freestone pear trees The present-day flowerbeds with hothouse flowers, garden sculptures and other design elements all correspond to XVIII – XIX centuries landscape design fashion.