TOn a weekend, wandering with a good companion through the wonderful labyrinth of leafy lanes that are the greenhouses of the University of Cambridge Botanic Garden, we spoke of an enduring hypothetical enigma of mine. If any of us – like tropical plant nuts – had unlimited money, would we rather have a big greenhouse in which to live our horticultural fantasies or would it make more sense to have a garden in the tropics?
As someone who has been obsessed since childhood with the mystical atmosphere of storytelling that rainforest species are uniquely able to create, my answer to this question has always been a surprise, even to me. Despite all the limitations of greenhouses, from the greatly restricted number and size of plants you can grow, to the limited range of features you can create inside them, I think I’d still settle for a greenhouse. This is because, to me, part of the charm of tropical plants is precisely their rarity and exotic nature.
When you step through the door of a lifeless gray British winter and instantly hit a wall of moisture and the warm, earthy scent of a rainforest floor, you transform that doorway into a portal to another world. It is this contrast that dramatizes the wonders of greenhouses so dramatically. Seeing plants crammed into spaces smaller than they are ideal for them also creates another contrast between the flat, straight lines of man-made buildings and the chaotic and wild wonders of nature which, to me, enhance this feeling of exploration, as life invades space.
Perhaps this is because my obsession with the tropics began not, as you might expect, in the rainforests of Singapore where I grew up, but on a trip to Kew Gardens in London as a child. The very plants I thought were a polite “parking” planting for proper horticulture seem completely unrecognizable pressed against steamy glass, or arched spectacularly on tunnel-like paths. It seems I’m not alone in this feeling: Even famous designers like Brazil’s Roberto Pearl Marx, who revolutionized the world of tropical garden design in the mid-20th century, wrote that his wonder about the tropics only took off when he visited greenhouses in Germany as a student. Native Amazon plants, those he took as roadside weeds for granted, suddenly became the focus of his designs, leaping to the fore and center of a new school of town planning, changing how we half the world’s gardens.
I wonder, from its roots, if this is what gardening is all about – trying to create the perfect escape from the rest of the world. We often talk about gardens as “natural”; However, they understand anything except. They are dramatic, stylized sets of what we think nature ‘should’ look like, nearly all of which is only possible by massive amounts of human dedication and ingenuity to force it to match our imaginations. Of all the gardening styles out there, this one undoubtedly reaches its peak in greenhouses. So, when I win the lottery, I think it’s a glass house that’s kind of like a Bond villain to me, and the weird good buddy I hang around with.
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