Now all of St. Petersburg is filled with the smell of lilac, almost like a week ago – the smell of smelt. The Mikhailovsky Garden is no exception – lilac actively blooms there.

Syringa vulgaris L., so in 1753 named this plant Linnaeus after the nymph Siringa, turned into a reed, from which the forest god Pan made the shepherd’s pipe “syrinx”.

A plant growing in the Balkan Mountains has long been used as a decorative in European gardens. In the Moscow gardens of Alexei Mikhailovich, the father of Peter I, lilacs were actively grown.

For the Mikhailovsky Garden at the beginning of the 20th century, the Russian Museum bought 300 copies of lilacs per season for decoration. True, in 1923 most of the lilac bushes of the Mikhailovsky Garden were used to decorate the Victims Square of the Revolution.
Currently, lilacs bloom both in the Mikhailovsky Garden and on the Field of Mars.

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