Krymskaya Embankment

Krymskaya Embankment is a one-kilometre-long linear park in central Moscow – often described as the city’s answer to the High Line. The name “Krymskaya” (meaning “Crimean”) has a historic origin. It refers to the former “Crimean Court,” where Crimean Tatar merchants and envoys once stayed in Moscow for trade and diplomatic exchanges. Formerly a busy riverside road, it was closed to traffic and transformed into a public park with a lime tree plaza, a large fountain in front of the New Tretyakov Gallery, and extensive naturalistic planting.

The new perennial meadows were Moscow’s first large-scale New Perennial Wave public-realm project. A year earlier, Anna Andreyeva – sometimes referred to as a Russian Piet Oudolf – had introduced the New Perennial Wave style to the Moscow public realm, designing and planting the city’s first borders of this kind in the same park.

The design evokes Eurasian hay meadows, with a matrix of blue moor grass (Molinia caerulea) and tufted hairgrass (Deschampsia cespitosa), enriched with meadow-steppe and prairie flowering plants for an ongoing display of colour throughout the season. Although the design was strikingly new and highly naturalistic for its time, it was very welcomed and resonated deeply with Muscovites’ expectations of urban planting. Until then, almost all public planting in Moscow – apart from the botanical gardens – was an exercise in Victorian-style bedding, which had found a sudden revival in the city 150 years later. The New Perennial Wave approach offered a radically different aesthetic yet felt immediately familiar, connecting with the deep cultural association of nature as an enduring civic and emotional value.

In June, the ‘Salvia hills’ become a local attraction, drawing crowds of Muscovites. Grasses, crabapples, and Majak shrubby willows – a Soviet-bred hybrid with vivid bark – provide strong winter structure and year-round visual interest.