Botanic gardens with their rich collections and scientific resources have a unique potential that attracts the attention of the society to the problems of preserving biodiversity, ensuring environmental education, conserving nature, providing leisure, serving the place for relaxation and entertainment. One of the oldest Botanic gardens of Russia is the Saint Petersburg Botanic Garden of the Komarov Botanic Institute of the Russian Academy of Sciences demonstrates the experience of utilizing the open ground collections for Botanic and environmental education. The experts share various aspects of interaction between a Botanic garden and its visitors. The paper provides examples of excursions and other forms of work on the open ground. The paper analyzes the experience of foreign colleagues related to the motivation for visiting Botanic gardens by different age and social groups. The authors provide data of sociological surveys of visitors and the analysis of their motives to visit the Saint Petersburg Botanic Garden in particular. It also shows the growth of interest in the open ground collections.

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The paper describes one of the ways of organizing educational activities in the expositions of the Peter the Great Botanical Garden in St. Petersburg. The authors study the problem of actualization of environmental knowledge among the population and preservation of biodiversity through leisure. The paper analyzes educational work in Russian botanical gardens and some foreign gardens at the present time. The authors introduce the term complex garden as a garden of broad educational opportunities. The paper describes a collection of plants of one of the oldest and largest botanical gardens in Russia. The authors demonstrate a variety of topics for study, detail the content of exhibitions and describe the ways of active and passive activity of visitors on the example of expositions of succulent plants. The paper provides a diagram of ecological and biological knowledge improvement.

Одним из популярных и известных каждому жителю Северо-Запада России растений является берёза. Известность растение приобрело благодаря культурным традициям народов или художественным образам берёз, воспетым художниками и поэтами. В статье приводится использование разных представителей рода Betula L. с целью экологического просвещения в Ботаническом саду Петра Великого БИН РАН. Представлен краткий обзор образовательных программ Ботанического Сада, описаны основные экологические признаки представителей рода. Ключевые слова: дендроколлекции, Betula L., экологическое просвещение, ботанический сад.

Environmental education in botanical gardens that deals with the conservation and study of plant biodiversity and environmental protection can be successfully integrated into any level of education. A successful option for such integration can be considered an environmental project launched in 2021 for pharmaceutical students in Peter the Great Botanical Garden of the Komarov Botanical Institute of Russian Academy of Sciences. The paper describes an experiment to identify the nature of the leading motives and the direction of students behavior in environmentally significant situations using the value-normative methodology of G.E. Zalessky. Experimental data allowed us to determine the preliminary typology of the level of environmental culture of pharmaceutical students before the start of the project. The results of the experiment show that the students of Murmansk Medical College developed a slightly higher level of ecological culture than the students of Saint Petersburg Pharmaceutical College (24% and 16%, respectively). However, at the same time 33% of the students of Murmansk Medical College showed a low level of ecological culture, which is almost twice higher than the students of Saint Petersburg Pharmaceutical College (16%). According to the indicator of a high level of ecological culture, pharmaceutical students of both experimental groups approach the results of O.I. Saltykova among schoolchildren and significantly exceed the results of students of other specialties.