Dendrarium. The Five Gardens of the Prisoner Dyagterev

How to cultivate your garden in a world where everything is burning and collapsing? This question had to be answered by Vladimir Degtyarev, a nobleman and traveler who traveled half the world as an agent of the Imperial
Botanical Garden, and after the revolution remained in Soviet Russia. A misunderstanding led Degtyarev to imprisonment in the Solovetsky camp, where the gardener stubbornly continued to work, creating a unique
dendarium in the harsh climate. Like the tropical plants he grew in the Far North, Degtyarev remained an otherworldly alien in Soviet reality — an astonishingly free man as if from
a 19th-century adventure novel, thrown into a world of camps and denunciations. Journalist and writer Alisa Kusti reconstructs Degtyarev's life, piecing together archival data, and turns his
story into a documentary book about the search for one's own place in the world, about creation amidst destruction, and about memory conquering oblivion.