Kozo-Polyansky Botanical Garden of Voronezh State University was awarded the silver medal of the 11th international festival of gardens and flowers “Garden City”. The opening ceremony was held on 10th September in the Central Park as part of the celebration of the 435th anniversary of Voronezh.
At the festival, VSU Botanical Garden presented a green laboratory which was decorated in line with the conception of the festival which was dedicated to the Year of Science and Technologies. The visitors could learn more about the world of botany by looking through the catalogue with the Latin names of the plants in Russian letters. At the exhibition you could also find herbarium collections, medicinal herbs, exotic plants and fruit, for example cacao beans used to make chocolate or kola nuts used to make drinks. The guests could use a microscope to see the structure of leaves. Children found this especially appealing as that was their first experience of observing the microworld.
One of the most popular characters at the exhibition of the Botanical Garden was the “mysterious healer” who was dressed in a costume and the mask of a plague doctor. The mask was made by Konstantin Moskaliov, a leather craftsman. The Botanical Garden exhibition also presented an installation that demonstrated medicinal herbs which were used to pack the inside of the masks of plague doctors in the Middle Ages. Now, during the coronavirus pandemic, the installation was of great interest.
“Designers Svetlana Unga and Albina Makarova put the exhibits together to make a uniform arrangement. We would like to thank them. Also, we would like to thank the mastermind of the exhibition, Andrey Voronin, the Director of the Botanical Garden. And, of course, we want to express our gratitude to the Faculty of Pharmaceutics which provided the exhibits, including the medicinal herbs. The representatives of the Faculty of Pharmaceutics, students Fedor Evsikov, Alexander Dunilin, and Alexey Bolgov and Associate Professor Alevtina Gudkova, were our assistants and experts who worked with the visitors”, said Lilia Lepeshkina, the leading biologist at the Botanical Garden and Associate Professor at the Faculty of Biomedical Sciences.
Last year, due to Covid restrictions the festival was held online. This year, the festival “Garden City” was dedicated to the Year of Science and Technologies. It gathered 157 participants. The winner of the event was the municipal administration.
Photo: VK group of Kozo-Polyansky Botanical Garden
of Voronezh State University
