Komarov Botanical Institute

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The Komarov Botanical Institute is the leading botanical institution in Russia. It is located in St. Petersburg, and is named after the Russian botanist Vladimir Leontjevich Komarov (1869-1945).

The institute's collections consist of outdoor and indoor gardens that are home to 120,000 species and varieties of plants, as well as herbarium collections that house over seven million specimens of plants and fungi. The collection is the largest in Russia, and among the three largest in the world.

The history of the institute dates back to 1714, when Tsar Peter the Great ordered the establishment of a pharmaceutical garden on Vorony island to grow medicinal plants The Garden was reorganized in 1823 and renamed the Imperial Botanical Garden, and in 1913 renamed the Peter the Great Imperial Botanical Garden. After the 1917 revolution it became the Botanical Garden of the USSR, and in 1930 it was transferred to the jurisdiction of the Russian Academy of Sciences, at that time the USSR Academy of Sciences. The following year the Botanical Garden and the Botanical Museum of the Academy of Sciences merged into a new organization, the Botanical Institute, which is today the Komarov Botanical Institute of the Russian Academy of Sciences.