Flowers International Womens Day - Expat in Kaliningrad, Russia

As summer fades …

Published: 13 September 2020

It only seems five minutes ago that I was remarking on the welcome novelty of buds and leaves appearing on the Königsberg-Kaliningrad trees, and now here we are in September, the leaves turning brown and yellow and falling to the ground.

Early yesterday morning I was alerted to this fact by our cat, who jumped off the sideboard and scampered out of the room. Gin-Ginskey is extremely intrepid when it comes to hunting flies but anything that sounds like a vacuum cleaner is bound to send him dashing for cover, and in this instance the vacuum cleaner was of the large lorry variety, sucking up leaves from the old cobbled streets and pavements in front of our house.

Kaliningrad a green city adorned with flowers

In spring and summer Kaliningrad is one of the greenest cities imaginable, a feature which the art-historian Victor Ryabinin noted was not true of its predecessor Königsberg. In what was the Maraunenhof district of Königsberg and in other areas developed during the first years of the 20^th century through to the 1920s, the streets are lined with Königsberg trees. Now they are old and gnarled, venerable survivors of a brutalised city, but back in the day when they were mere precocious saplings they would not have provided the streets of Königsberg with the leafy green vistas and avenues of which Kaliningrad is the fortunate benefactor.

Indeed, Kaliningrad is a city of green open spaces: along the banks of the Pregel river where warehouses once have stood, surrounding the cathedral on Kneiphof Island, around and in front of the House of Soviets, that most controversial of Kaliningrad’s structures, in the numerous grassed quadrangles between the flats, and around the banks and perimeter of the upper and lower ponds.

Three or four large public parks, each endowed with their own distinctive character, contribute copiously to the leafy green landscape, creating rural backwaters in the heart of the city, which in the spring and summer months form natural retreats from the relentless pace and energy of urban living.

Kaliningrad green & adorned with flowers

Kaliningrad in the kind seasons is also a city rich with blooms and flowers of seemingly endless variety. You will find them everywhere: in the enviable gardens of the Maraunenhof villas, along the banks of the river, in municipal planters and thoughtfully planted flower beds, in the small border gardens that front the old German flats and the cottage gardens lovingly planted and tended at the foot of the Khrushchev flats ~ these borders can be surprisingly large and full of the most eclectic variety of flowers and flora.

You will find flowers adorning balconies, in window boxes and hanging baskets, some so prodigiously and impressively arranged that they are left to spill over on their own accord or are trained to cascade imaginatively into the garden below.

Shrubs, bushes, silver birch, pine, all manner of fir trees ~ even blue ones! ~ are thrown into the mix. Evergreen hedgerows tower above and push their way through perimeter railings, forming dense thickets for garden privacy, whilst fences new and old act as impromptu trellis work for climbing plants of every denomination.

And even though Kaliningrad is a bustling modern city, one of its more appealing attributes to my mind is that here and there you can stumble upon curious pockets of wild naturalistic vegetation, small friendly jungles that turn otherwise neglected spaces and mundane objects into inherently picturesque compositions ~ an old garage door, for example, biffed and battered through age and use, transformed by climbing foliage into a quaint vignette of antiquity or a ropey looking fence entwined with vines instantly elevated to photographic status~ the very stuff that artists delight in for its authentic old-world charm.

Although, as summer retreats, the pines and firs will not forsake us, in a few weeks from now the deciduous varieties will lose their foliage, the scene will shift to winter and the built-on urban landscape will assert itself again.

Hopefully, however, our collection of photographs taken during the spring and summer months will remind you how blessed Kaliningrad is to possess such examples of nature’s beauty and will help to sustain and lift your spirits through the winter months to come.