Tsarskoe Selo joined the project Museum Rose: a story told by the plant, earlier initiated by the Nikita Botanical Garden and the Vorontsov Palace.

Now the project includes fourteen museums from all over the country, all of them members of the Historic Gardens and Parks Revival Association.

On 14 July, our parks curator Olga Filippova gave a special tour of the Maids-of-Honour Garden and a talk on rose varieties during the time of Alexander Pushkin. The poet's 225th birth anniversary is commemorated in 2024.

The highlight of the tour was the planting of a Countess Vorontsova rose, the oldest Russian surviving variety of garden roses specially brought to the Catherine Park from the Vorontsov Palace of the Crimea.

The Countess Vorontsova rose was hybridised by Nikolai Gartvis in 1829 and named after Elizabeth Vorontsova, the spouse of Novorossiysk governor general Michael Vorontsov and a muse of Alexander Pushkin.