Paradise Under Glass: An Amateur Creates a Conservatory Garden

241 Pages·2010·2.76 MB·English

by  Ruth Kassinger

Paradise Under Glass
An Amateur Creates a Conservatory Garden
Ruth Kassinger

For Ted, and in memory of Joan Huber Good
Contents
Introduction
One The Plant at the Top of the Stairs
Two Oranges
Three Construction
Four Plant Hunting
Five Beyond Foliage
Six Entertaining
Seven Wintergardens
Eight Perfect Plants
Nine Ferns
Ten Invaders
Eleven Apopka
Twelve Paradise
Thirteen Living Walls
Appendix A: Pronunciation Guide
Appendix B: How to Create a Living Wall
Bibliography
Acknowledgments
About the Author
Credits
Copyright
About the Publisher
Introduction
I
was sitting at the breakfast table in the conservatory this morning, looking out
the window and watching the wind blow puffs of snow off the roof, when a
kumquat, deep orange and the size of a large grape, fell off a tree and rolled
across the limestone floor. Scotia, our white West Highland terrier, who was
lying in a wicker armchair with her head on her paws, saw it, too. Before I could
open my mouth, she launched herself off the chair like a swimmer out of the
blocks, snapped it up, and swallowed it whole.
Many, many are the pleasures of an indoor garden in a cold climate. Mostly,
they are visual ones. I look around me. I have eight hanging baskets: orange,
goldfish-shaped Nematanthus flowers are brilliant against the mat of their
plump, deep green leaves; the Boston ferns sport thick manes of bright green,
serrated fronds; and the winter jasmine has a blizzard of starry, white flowers
that nod in the light breeze of the overhead fans. My two traveler’s palms brush
the skylights with their giant canoe-paddle leaves, and Juncus spiralis, a wiry
marsh grass, corkscrews up from shallow planters on the floor. There are
aromatic pleasures, too. The Calamondin orange, ‘Meyer’ lemon, and key lime
trees are in bloom, and the scent of their small, white flowers is sweet and
piercing. Still, I have to say, and I assume Scotia would back me up, a kumquat
fresh off the tree in February is a delight without compare.
I call this room a conservatory, but others might call it a sunroom or a Florida
room. In the nineteenth century, if it had been many times larger, it would have
been called a wintergarden. The room is an addition we had built in the angle
between the two wings of our old house in suburban Maryland. Its walls and
roof are of standard two-by-four construction, and the outside is sheathed in
white-painted shingles to match the rest of the house. Glass fills the walls: the
windows on the long side are ten feet tall, and the shorter wall is one large bay
window. More than half the ceiling is open to light, thanks to twelve skylights in
the roof. Two overhead fans keep the air moving. A pale blue wirework dining
table with six chairs and the wicker armchair—Scotia’s chair—are the only
pieces of furniture. For the most part, the space is furnished—Ted, my husband,
might say overfurnished—with plants.
Most of my plants are thriving. The tall, green-leafed plants—a dragon tree
Dracaena, an umbrella tree, four bird-of-paradise, a batwing Alocasia, and a
cutleaf Philodendron, among others—are doing very well. In pots on the floor, I
have a collection of Anthurium, Dieffenbachia, and an assortment of begonias
whose pink, green, and chocolate leaves are wildly patterned in polka dots,
swirls, and rays. Three varieties of Streptocarpus with their small and velvety,
blue, red, and purple flowers dress the windowsills. Because it is winter, my
collection of ten citrus, guava, and other tropical fruit trees and bushes is
clustered under two pairs of grow lights. A coffee bush, a fig, a large jade plant,
several cactus, and a pineapple plant, which to my astonishment has sent a
pineapple skyward, are lodging in the bay window. One wall is completely
carpeted in plants. Ted might have a point.
All is not success, though, and I am sorry to see that some plants are looking
tired, and some that could have flowers do not. This is because, in part, I am still
new to indoor gardening, and I keep experimenting, choosing among the
hundreds of tropical and semitropical plants that could, hypothetically, grow
indoors. I am still having trouble accepting the fact that my conservatory is
north-facing and partially shaded from the best southern sun by the second floor
of our house, and so is not well suited to “high-light” plants. Although I have
learned to stay away from plants with tags that read “requires full sun,” I am
fundamentally an optimist, and if a plant promises brilliant flowers and calls for
“partial sun,” I will take a chance. Sometimes these plants work; sometimes they
don’t. I wasn’t so venturesome when I started out, but I’ve learned by now to
deal with losses.
There is another reason for some of my failures: until I stocked this
conservatory, I had no gardening experience of any kind, either outdoors or in.
Many of my friends and my family—Ted, an avid outdoor gardener, in particular
—are amazed that I set out to create a conservatory and that I have had any
success at all. Frankly, so am I.
It isn’t that I don’t appreciate gardens. I do, and always have. I grew up in
Baltimore, and when my sister, Joanie, and I were young, my parents took us to
all the public gardens. There was Sherwood Gardens where we went every April
to see the tulips, Cylburn Park where we picnicked among blue and yellow
wildflowers, and Druid Hill Park, near my grandparents’ apartment, where we
strolled around the reservoir and admired the flowers and the fountain that at
night changed colors. Now, when Ted and I travel, we often visit the local
botanical gardens. Our house is just a mile outside Washington, D.C., and we
occasionally ride bikes in the National Arboretum and walk through the gardens
at Dumbarton Oaks. Longwood Gardens in Kennet Square, Pennsylvania,
Winterthur Garden in Delaware, and Ladew Topiary Gardens in Monkton,
Maryland, are an easy drive.
Enjoying a garden and creating one, however, have always been completely
unrelated activities to my mind. Ted, who will jot down names of shrubs and
plants he sees so he can investigate whether they might work in our backyard,
has never understood my attitude. I enjoy going to museums and concerts, I tell
him, but that doesn’t mean I go home and want to pick up a paintbrush or a
clarinet. No, I have always been perfectly content to appreciate the expert efforts
of others. The urge to pick up a trowel, much less a shovel, or even a pair of
clippers never struck me, at least not until recently.
So what inspired me to build a conservatory?
One winter four years ago, I briefly held a consulting job at an office on
Capitol Hill. Walking to the Metro station to go home one late afternoon, I was
in a gloomy mood. Our oldest daughter, Anna, had left for college on the West
Coast, and Austen, a high school senior, was filling out college applications. Our
youngest, Alice, was thirteen and seemed especially eager to grow up. She was
so busy with school and sports, homework and her social life, we were often
reduced to communicating by text message. Where had our little girls gone, the
wide-eyed toddlers with their pixie haircuts who tracked my every movement,
dripped juice on the kitchen floor and spilled tears when I took their drawings
off the refrigerator (only to make room for new drawings!), and told me
solemnly, each one, that they would never ever ever leave home? And where was
that young mother who failed to get those promises in writing and—how could I
have been so foolish?—daydreamed from time to time of the day when her
thoughts would not revolve around those little girls?
In a different universe of loss, Joanie had died of a brain tumor in February a
year earlier. She had been my best friend and my older girls’ special aunt, the
looser, cooler version of their mother. She was the brunette with the fierce blue
eyes and the traffic-stopping figure who had Roller-bladed around our staid
neighborhood dressed in shiny aqua leggings and a leotard, pushing Alice in her
stroller. For decades, Joanie and I talked several times a week and, during certain
stretches—during one of Joanie’s boyfriend crises, for example—every day. We
had long ago decided we would always visit our aging parents together. It had all
been planned.
I had less than a month to grieve for her, though. In early March, I was
diagnosed with breast cancer and was instantly swept from the shore of the
present by a riptide of disease. I could only ride it out out there, essentially
alone, trying to keep my head above the chop of fear, through the surgeries, the
waiting, the radiation, and the gut-twisting chemotherapy. I treaded water,
hoping I wouldn’t be swept over the horizon, out of view of my family who
tracked me, anxiously and steadfastly, from the shores of health. Indeed, a year
later, my hair had grown back and my oncologist assured me I would outlive
him. But although I seemed to be back on solid ground, I was uneasy. What
other treacheries lay in wait in middle age?
So it was into the late afternoon, with change and loss on my mind, that I
walked west down Independence Avenue. I didn’t usually go this way; another
Metro station was closer, but the street had been blocked off—a demonstration
maybe or the imminent arrival of a motorcade. Suddenly, I was struck by the
view of the U.S. Botanic Garden’s Conservatory ahead of me, with its cluster of
rounded glass roofs gilded by the setting sun. As I drew closer, I saw that the
conservatory had reopened; for years it had been closed and surrounded by a tall,
board fence. It had been a very long time, about four decades I realized, since the
last, the only, time I’d been inside. Although my watch read 4:30 and the sign on
the door said the building closed at 5:00, I decided to take a quick look.
I walked in from the cold and through the anteroom. The glass doors to the
largest conservatory, the Palm House, silently parted, and I stepped through. In
the instant before a wave of moist warm air fogged my glasses, I was
overwhelmed by a view of a vast and dense jungle of greenery. When my glasses
cleared, I looked up, following the trunks of the palm trees to the roof, an
arching structure of curved glass crisscrossed with metal frames and struts.
Several stories above me, through a scrim of palm fronds, I could see pieces of
sky. Vapor languished in the air, and the mugginess after the biting cold outside
made me feel almost drugged.
I wandered along the sinuous flagstone paths, crossing the stream that wound
through the understory. There were so many variations, it struck me, on the
theme of Green Leaf: sculpted or feathery; veined in white, gray, or maroon,
edged in pink, or backed in a somber purple; shiny or dull; vining, spreading, or
gripping the ground; as small as shirt buttons or as big and wrinkled as an
elephant’s ear. Only a few bright flowers pricked the backdrop of foliage:
Anthurium with lipstick red flowers that looked as if they were made of plastic,
and bromeliads with spiky blooms in garish shades of orange and magenta.
I hiked up an accordion of a metal staircase that led to a catwalk that circled
the Palm House. Here was where most of the flowering plants lived, out of the
shade of the palms. Tiny yellow orchids, bougainvillea with flowers that shaded
from pink to peach, a rainbow of hibiscus, bleeding heart with drops of blood at
the end of their white blossoms, and indigo passionflowers clung to tree
branches and railings or perched on the ledge that ran around the perimeter.