If you asked me who has driven gardening forward — who has added new breeds and varieties to our gardens and taught us to see the world differently — I’d point to a particular type: the obsessed, the idealists, the fanatics. They appear among both professional and amateur gardeners. They don’t work for money, medals, or favors. They ignore their own comfort and pour themselves into proving again that people don’t live by bread alone, and that life’s meaning isn’t measured by the quality of soup or the size of stone palaces. More than anyone, these people understand that bringing humans and nature into harmony also improves how we relate to one another and fills life with uncommon beauty.
In our messy lives, these people are at best inconvenient. Their odd behavior and hard-to-explain motives don’t fit neat stereotypes, and they pose problems for those in power — people who expect everyone to be asking, pleading, or pushing for something. Sometimes it’s tempting to push them out, to remove a nuisance so our complacency and self-importance go unchallenged. But they have always existed and always will. They are especially numerous among gardeners, probably because of the tough realities of the work: first, fruits and berries are often treated as a “third course,” which invites a dismissive attitude; second, developing a new variety can take 15 to 50 years depending on the crop; and third, every failure — a lost tree or a dead plant — costs the gardener years of time, and time is irreversible.
You can’t tell all their stories, though I wish you could. Still, you can glimpse the lives, efforts, hopes, and disappointments of dozens through the story of one gardener. Their stories are much the same, varying only in the details.
Vladimir Ilyich Zhilyin lives on the banks of the Tom River — still flowing, if not especially clean — in Novokuznetsk’s Novoilyinka neighborhood. But you might also run into him in Moscow, Krasnoyarsk, Barnaul, Kyiv, Sverdlovsk, Simferopol, or wherever something interesting in gardening is happening. Many gardeners — even generations — know him. Maybe you do too; gardeners tend to be a friendly, sociable bunch.
He graduated from horticultural college in 1948. Since then, with tireless energy, he’s tried to turn Novokuznetsk into a garden city and introduce to the Kuzbass plants that were little known or entirely unknown here. By normal standards he’d have been retired for over a decade, tending what’s already been collected and proven to work in Kuzbass. But that’s not Zhilyin. He can’t stay put when he hears about a new variety in a paper or a book. Meetings are quick; he has to see new plants with his own eyes, and if possible, bring them back to test them in Kuzbass.
Anyone who’s dealt with our airports, roads, and railways knows the misery of endless waiting rooms at stations and the travel itself. That’s where you feel most vulnerable. Add the worry about finding a place to stay, and the sameness of hotels in big and small cities becomes astonishing: “No vacancies” — and even if you collapsed, no one would notice.
But a gardener chasing novelty isn’t easily scared. Finally the goal is reached. After long waits, conversations, and going in circles, the plants are in hand. Sometimes it’s a full backpack; sometimes just a few specimens or a handful of cuttings. Everything is carefully packed — heaven forbid anything perish on the way — and off he goes. From the station, without stopping at home, straight to the planting site.
He tried to secure a permanent plot — he once asked for 12 hundredths of a hectare. At the vote, not a single hand went up; they unanimously decided to give him only 6 hundredths. “But I’m doing this for you. I don’t need anything for myself,” he said. No one heard — they moved on to the next question. And more trials began. Where to plant the plants? Where to test them?
He spots a half-abandoned greenhouse and persuades them: “I’ll tidy it up. We’ll propagate the plants. It will benefit everyone.” They let him in — sometimes willingly, sometimes begrudgingly. Through incredible effort he brings it back to order and fills it with plants. The owner looks and thinks, “We can run this greenhouse ourselves. Why do we need this grumbler? He’s never satisfied: either the watering is wrong, or he brought nematodes, or he moved plants to the wrong spot. Enough; get rid of him.” And they do. The plants — alive, valuable, unique — are bundled out with him into the street. This happened when he worked at the circus, and later when he helped dismantle greenhouses at various schools in Novoilyinka. Now an institute (or college) that trains teachers seems willing to give him a greenhouse. But for how long?
It’s no better with open ground. Sometimes they let him use a school patch for a while, and other times it’s bulldozed. What can you do with six hundredths? Still, the work goes on. With disappointments and setbacks, but it goes on.
How many plants has he brought in? Thousands, maybe tens of thousands. All need care. It’s frustrating to discard a newcomer, but worse to lose a true candidate for introduction into Kuzbass gardens. Vladimir Ilyich never gives up. Time and again he retrieves and checks. “I only believe in experiments,” he says. “To evaluate something, you have to test it seven times.”
He likes to recall meetings with M. A. Lisavenko, who gave him many good pieces of advice. Lisavenko shared his disappointments and mistakes and warned him where to be cautious and where to act with certainty. Once Mikhail Afanasyevich said, “Look, Volodya, you can’t work alone in such a complex field. You’ll be crushed — crushed by indifference toward your work, toward the cause of your life.” Vladimir Ilyich remembers those words when he finds himself on the street with his plants, when he watches a little nursery crushed under the wheels of a tractor clearing the area for something else — a shed, or a cooperative café.
Vladimir Ilyich, a true amateur, can’t resist stopping for interesting ornamental plants even when he’s traveled long distances for two or three cuttings of currants or gooseberries. They’ll be useful for indoor greening, parks, courtyard decoration, or street plantings. They can suit local conditions and have a place. Bit by bit, a vast collection grew — dozens, then hundreds of species. Subtropical and tropical plants sit beside desert species and Far North flora. A banana grows next to Himalayan cedars and rare, beautiful bamboos from Japan and China. The collection kept growing. Where to put it? Where to preserve it — and show it to people, to introduce them to nature’s wonders? They found a place.
Energetic, responsive, well-liked young leaders — the Sports Palace director and his deputy — let him display the collection in the building’s foyer. They figured the Palace draws a lot of people; during breaks between hockey games, visitors could step into a completely different world. If even the tenth or the hundredth person feels a stir at the sight of an unusual plant and realizes how many species are disappearing and only survive in the Red Book, the exhibition will have done its job.
The location, however, is risky. Fans are good people but very emotional, and if their team loses, the plants often suffer. The plants can’t run, hide, or fight back. Open and defenseless, in basins or buckets of soil, they stand where they were placed. One terrible fate befell a whole colony of agaves: exceptionally beautiful and proud, they ended up hopelessly damaged. It’s bitter, and worrying that tomorrow the same could happen to other plants that survived today.
Vladimir Ilyich laments, “I’m not trading, I’m not getting rich, I’m not hiding anything; I give everything freely and joyfully to people. Take it, use it. Why trample on beauty, the unique creations of nature so cruelly?” He calls such actions vandalism but doesn’t harbor hate. He believes people are basically good. Look at children — honest, sensitive, curious. Thoughts of cruelty and hardened hearts come later.
I asked him where his passion for collecting comes from. He answers: because our greening is poor. A poplar is fine — it has advantages — but you can’t rely on it alone. Topolniki Park is almost all poplars. On streets and squares, if anything survives, it’s poplars. Yet there are so many other beautiful plants. He dreams, for example, of chestnuts. “I have no doubt they’ll be here in time, along with other beautiful trees,” he says. “And how are building interiors decorated? The ultimate cliché is the palm. It needs so much space — up to six square meters. It gets boring to have the same tree for years.” And so he begins to imagine the future.
At the city nature conservation society, two very likable women say, “We approach Vladimir Ilyich with respect and sympathy. He’s a wonderful person and a knowledgeable specialist, but what can our weak, very poor organization do?” They are modest; they can do a lot. They organized a strong volunteer group who genuinely care for nature. For about an hour we talked, but never were we alone. People came and went — young men and women who rushed in to resolve urgent issues and then returned to work.
Remember Lisavenko’s words: “Volodya, you can’t take on a big task alone.” Now Vladimir Ilyich isn’t alone, but he’s still poorly protected. Why only the nature conservation society? Where is the City Council? In an ecologically troubled city like Novokuznetsk there should be a strong ecological commission. If it exists, why not unite these forces and bring in a qualified gardener as a consultant? Why not organize a permanent exhibition called “Plants and Us”? Why, finally, does the city paper, which publishes a whole page of birthday announcements and classifieds, have no space for gardeners? Much can be done with a little desire, and the payoff would be large.
Schools shouldn’t stand aside. Their job is to teach people entering life not to destroy but to beautify the earth. They should not drive Zhilyin out of greenhouses or from his plot; they should ensure he meets children at least once a week, take them to the greenhouses and plant exhibitions, and tell them about the plants’ amazing properties and uses. Vladimir Ilyich knows how to talk about this.
Late that evening, when darkness hid the plants, we stopped by the gardener’s home. I saw he gains no profit from his titanic labor. “I’m doing this for you,” he’d said. Books, magazines, parcels, seeds, pots, fertilizers — he stores them everywhere. His mother’s room holds extra space; in the kitchen you have to step carefully past seeds spread on the floor. From his own belongings he keeps only the bare essentials. No sofas, no cabinets, no soft chairs. Above it all hangs a bare light bulb on a wire. You might think, just sell a small part of the collection at state prices and be satisfied. But Vladimir Ilyich is not that kind of gardener — “I’m doing this for you.”
If he ever comes to you for a new variety, don’t hesitate to give it to him. It will go to good hands. Don’t make excuses: “We’ll send it to you — we’ll definitely send it.” He believes that, and then he laments, “Perhaps they forgot in the midst of their affairs.” No — they didn’t forget; they spoke empty words to brush him off. But he’ll come again: he needs to test the variety and, if successful, share it with fellow gardeners. Don’t be afraid to let him into the greenhouse or onto the plot. Working with him will bring immense benefits. Above all, he can show even seasoned gardeners nature and plants from the most unexpected angles. He will teach kindness, and we desperately need that today.
