The 9th annual festival of orchids, predatory plants and succulents is being held in Moscow from December 23, 2017 till April 2018.
“Tropical Winter. In Search of Golden City” offers a large-scale exhibition, spectacular interior design in the style of the legendary Eldorado and an extensive cultural program with concerts, as well as a festival of masterpieces of silent cinema.
Visitors will see the rarest tropical orchids of the most unexpected shapes and sizes with the amazing smells of chocolate, biscuits, cheese, dust, evening perfumes, cinnamon, tiramisu and fruits. Here are the world’s blackest, the smallest, the most expensive, the most sinister orchids, bee orchids and tiger orchids, hairy orchids and shoe orchids with huge lips. Some species are so rare that they can hardly be found in wilderness anymore.
The main theme of the festival 2017/18 is “In Search of Eldorado and Gold of the Inca”. A palm greenhouse has turned into that very mythical South American Golden City, rich in precious metal and stones. In fruitless attempts to find Eldorado, conquistadors of the 16^th century paved new ways into the depths of South America. The search yielded very valuable geographical and ethnographic results, but cost numerous lives and massive material loss. The festival guests hunting for gold will face here amazing discoveries and meetings with the Inca.
In addition to the orchids, there are world’s largest water lilies, cocoa, guavas, papayas, papyrus, sugar cane, huge bananas, tropical cacti, coffee, century-old palms, mangoes, pineapples, bromeliads, ferns, lianas, flowering amorphophallus with the smell of rotten meat, insectivorous venus flycatchers, sundries, chickenpox and the oldest greenhouse plant in Russia participating in the festival.
To top it off, the visitors are welcomed to see one of Russia’s richest collections of cacti, aloe, agave, "living stones", "queens of the night" cacti-lianas, and mandrake roots.
The musical part of the festival embraces concerts in the framework of the project "Star Laboratory and Vocal Art Workshop" under the guidance of Russian opera star and vocal teacher Lyubov Kazarnovskaya, the evenings of the revolutionary song, and many other events.
In addition, visitors to the garden will have a chance to watch the updated program of the festival "Masterpieces of Silent Cinema" with improvisations of the tapestry virtuoso on a grand piano of the 19^th century.
Every visit to the festival is a spectacular journey to an exotic fairy tale with the goal of finding the most interesting plants in the jungle thickets and feel like a hunter for orchids and gold.
Throughout the festival new plants will appear and blossom. The exposition is updated several times a week.
The interiors of the 9^th Tropical Winter have been design by the best florists of Moscow under the leadership of the Russian Floristry Champion, Andrey Filonenko in cooperation with the Garden’s landscape architect Artem Parshin, the chief gardener Anton Dubenyuk and the curator of the Garden’s tropical plants collection, Vitaly Alenkin. Exhibition samples are presented in their most natural form. Find the most rare and remarkable plants amidst the thickets of palms and other large inhabitants of the greenhouse.