(16 Jan 2020) LEAD IN: In the grip of the Russian winter, the Moscow State University Botanical Garden is offering visitors a taste of tropical summer.
Thousands of orchids, predatory plants and succulents are on display at the popular "Tropical Winter" festival which returns to Moscow for the 11th year running.
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Stunning orchids bloom in the warmth of Moscow's State University Botanical Garden's glasshouse.
While winter reigns outside visitors soon warm up when the step into the "Tropical Winter" festival - a stunning display of orchids, predatory plants and succulents.
Back for the 11th year, there are thousands of different types of orchids and tropical plants here - some outstanding for their colour, others for their incredible aromas and rarity.
Aleksey Reteyum, Director of the Botanical Garden says: "We are using the historical space of our tropical greenhouse, officially it is called Palm Greenhouse, in order to create a kind of winter extravaganza, because while outside it is winter, it is cold, we want people to get into summer at least for a few moments."
With 1,100 different varieties, this is the biggest collection of orchids in Russia.
There are orchids here of every imaginable colour, some smell of fruit, others of chocolate or cinnamon and there are even some that smell of mothballs and dust.
"When I studied in the Moscow State University which this botanical garden belongs to, it was considered that there are over twenty-six thousand types of orchids, nowadays there are even more than that. The variety is really amazing, and many of them look so that you will never guess that this is orchid," says Reteyum.
One of the rarest varieties here is this Yellow Golden Slipper orchid - it occurs only in the Chinese province of Yunnan.
Orchids have been around for millions of years. Attracted to the vibrant colours they can produce, plant breeders have been creating varieties for more than 200 years.
One of the most popular man-made orchids is the black Fredclarkeara. Here at the botanical garden, organisers say its blooming causes huge excitement every year.
"You can rarely find this (colour) in nature. Maybe there are some orchids that look similar, whose colour is close to black, even among wild types, but still the blackest one is this one, Fredclarkeara," says Reteyum.
People come from all over Russia to see the rare plant which inspired the famous fashion designer Tom Ford to create the fragrance of the same name 'Black Orchid' in 2006.
The Dracula orchid is so called due to its fang like shape.
"The flowers have a kind of marginal look, often resembling some open (animal) mouth. This looks like a monkey mouth, as it is believed, often it looks like an open mouth or a piece of decaying meat, these are the associations that people who described this plant genus for the first time had at the time," explains curator, Sergey Isaev.
Orchids grow in all climatic zones, except for glaciers and particularly arid regions. One of the most well known and loved is the Lady Slipper variety.
"The typical look of orchids is the flower of various so-called Lady Slipper orchids. It is a hybrid of the 19th century Paphiopedilum Leeanum, it is a hybrid of different close to each other plant species. It is rather plain but so exotic, that there is a whole society of fans of this particular type of lady slipper orchid," says Isaev.
Hundreds of thousands of visitors are expected here over the next few months until the festival closes in early April.
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