Elena Kuzmina: Floriculture - Destiny And Vocation

Elena Olegovna (Marasanova) Kuzmina has been cooperating with our magazine since its first issues. Over the past dozen years, she has published dozens of articles about garden and indoor flower plants, about the formation of the garden landscape. The digest offered to readers includes her best publications about plants loved by flower growers.

And here is what she herself says about flowers in her life: I was extremely lucky in life: an early interest in flowers became a vocation that determined my entire future. A huge role in this was played by my parents, as well as the Control and Seed Experimental Station in the city of Pushkin.

I learned about its existence in early childhood from my father - Oleg Alexandrovich Marasanov. The biggest miracle in my childhood for me was the appearance in our house on New Year's Eve of a basket … with blooming lilies of the valley! And this miracle was created by the skill of the KSOS specialists! Later, on behalf of my father, I myself came for such a basket and saw how this forcing was carried out on the upper floor of the laboratory house on specially equipped racks.

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And so in 1968 I graduated from school with a gold medal, and I entered the fruit and vegetable faculty of the Leningrad Agricultural Institute. The fact is that only at this faculty it was possible to obtain the specialization of a florist. At home, they decided that this choice was not accidental. After all, from the still unconscious age of three, I grew up in the garden that my parents laid on the outskirts of Pushkin. The garden has forever become an integral part of our family's life. And in a tiny front garden under the windows of our little house, flowers grew, which over time I began to grow myself. Father planted his own garden with several bushes of currants, raspberries and gooseberries for my sister and me in a sunny meadow in the courtyard.

In the winter of 1973, I graduated from the Leningrad Agricultural Institute, the diploma said: a scientist agronomist, a horticultural grower with a specialization in floriculture. All the years of study I was engaged in experimental work, and from the second year - my thesis - on the basis of KSOS. And, of course, I dreamed of working at the Station.

And now - I am already a foreman of the department of selection and seed production of summer and biennials of the Control and Seed Experimental Station. I had to work all my life in a sea of ​​flower beauty, and every winter I would start with sowing the smallest dust-grain seeds (semperflorence begonias and tuberous ones, which we were one of the first to grow), later - the sport of varietal ferns for open ground and home interiors, the entire palette of annuals, biennials, perennials, flowering shrubs, resulting in countless flowers. If you multiply this by 20 years of work ahead - is this not happiness? After all, living surrounded by beauty, creating it with your own hands is wonderful!

Unfortunately, in the early 90s, destructive processes began in the economy, which led to the actual destruction of the Station. But I want to believe that it will still be reborn and will again serve our great city.