A rare flower bloomed in the Nizhny Novgorod Botanical Garden for the first time in 12 years

The plant Strelitzia Nicholas was named after the son of Emperor Nicholas I

The exotic Strelitzia Nicholas bloomed in the Botanical Garden of Nizhny Novgorod State University for the first time in 13 years. A flower with a diameter of 30 centimeters opened at a height of seven meters from the ground.

Photo by UNN

As reported at UNN, the perennial tree-like plant Strelitzia Nikolai was donated to the botanical garden in 2006 by Mikhail Mokrousov, a graduate of the UNN biology department and a great plant lover. At that time it was a small plant in a pot. It quickly took root in the university's tropical greenhouse and bloomed for the first time in 2011.

Since then, it has never bloomed again. For the second time in history, this happened on March 12 — a flower that had disappeared from the natural environment and reached a height of 10 meters reappeared. It opened at a height of seven meters from the ground.

The generic name of this plant is given in honor of Princess Charlotte of Mecklenburg-Strelitz, wife of the British King George III, patroness of the Royal Botanic Gardens Kew in London. As for the specific name, it was given in honor of Grand Duke Nikolai Nikolaevich the Elder, the third son of Emperor Nicholas I and Alexandra Fedorovna. The Grand Duke was the royal curator of the St. Petersburg Botanical Garden, where a specimen of this unusual plant was planted, brought by an embassy delegation in the mid-19th century as a gift to Tsar Nicholas I.