Surrounding
the lodge were a number of other, smaller buildings designed by de Rochefort,
including houses for members of the Suite, Entourage, and Household; a lodge
for the Imperial Huntsmen; a bathhouse; the stables for forty horses; the
kennels; the Orthodox Church of St. Nicholas the Miracle Worker, with a unique
porcelain iconostasis; and a power plant, hidden from the lodge by a screen of
trees and situated at an artificial dam over the Hwozna River, beyond the
entrance bridge.
Landscape
architect Valery Kronenberg laid out the 50-hectare new garden surrounding the
lodge in 1895, taking advantage of the dam over the Hwozna River to irrigate
the artificial lakes that stretched in front of the main building. One-hundred-sixty species of trees and shrubs
grew in the Park when he had finished, laid out in English style, with clumps
of trees and glades on wide green lawns.
They were brought from various climate zones, mainly from
Today, the park itself is in beautiful condition. Of the 160 varieties of tree and shrub planted originally, up to 80 have survived the depredations of the 20th Century, and are in mature bloom in every shade of green; in the great sky overhead, an occasional eagle hovers over the dense forest. One of the houses for the suite, (Dom Swicki), just beyond the palace, was used as an occasional retreat by visiting Soviet Premiers, but mysteriously burned to the ground a few days before the arrival of Nikita Kruschev in 1963, to be replaced by an unlovely contemporary structure.
