If you have space and resources in a garden it’s ideal to have a greenhouse. And to add a nursery to that. Having got two acres to fill with plants 39 years ago, I invested in (and we built) the greenhouse and then I built myself a nursery.
Charles and Angus have just rebuilt much of the nursery - being mostly wood, it had mostly rotted. And I’ve begun clearing and tidying the greenhouse. I now look at the accumulation of plants - all outdoors in the nursery now - with great pleasure. Shortly we’ll be opening the garden to visitors, and then I shut the gate to the nursery to clearly indicate that I’m not selling plants. (Sorry)
I was remembering the other day that some open gardens also open their greenhouses to paying visitors. Maybe not their nurseries, as those do speak loudly of Sales! to most garden lovers. Now, I’ve never really understood this greenhouse opening. On occasion I’ve wandered down a narrow passage looking at collections of plants and wondered why I’m doing that. Greenhouses are mostly for working in and sheltering plants from the weather, aren’t they?
And I’m a freaky garden person: I don’t relish just looking at plants for their own sake - I like to see them contributing to a beautiful or exciting garden scene. So this looking at plants in pots doesn’t do much for me.
Though, there I am, looking at my renovated nursery, full of plants waiting their turn for display or planting, thinking, that looks good. Not good enough to show anyone, but good enough to make me think that gardeners could make more of nurseries and greenhouses. A plant collection could be arranged to work as a dramatic display. There are models for this amongst the nurseries displaying their plants at garden shows, like Chelsea.
And it’s true that I continuously attempt to have the plants in our conservatory display well.
But it’s definitely part of our home:
We don’t ‘open’ the conservatory when we open the garden, but we do let people who express an interest in it to look - the door is kept open. It’s a sort of after thought and it’s notable that when we’ve had the garden photographed for publication the conservatory (and the greenhouse and nursery) get left out. All these places seem to me to have a sort of ambiguous status - but then maybe the gardens which open to the public do have an ambiguous status anyway? Have you ever visited a neighbour’s garden, open for the NGS, just to have a nose around?
So, I wonder, are there places which specialise in beautiful displays in these ambiguous spaces. That may be worth a trip for their own sake? That is what the Eden Project is, I suppose. Though, if I remember rightly, that did feel more like visiting a gallery or museum than a garden. (or home) And I find the glasshouses at Kew the most boring bit.
Do people visit a greenhouse or someone’s conservatory as a kind of peek into a private space, so that if they just have a random assortment of plants sitting around in them that really doesn’t matter?
Basically: are greenhouses and other people’s random plant places interesting?
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And here are my thoughts last year at this time:
I love seeing a working space! Obviously it is nice to see a beautiful display of plants but working spaces are just as interesting to me. I'm the one who always peers through the gaps in the partition to the 'ugly' area when I visit gardens just to see how other gardeners organise their working and propagation areas. I also like working greenhouses to get ideas about best way to grow plants in them. I like to see who keeps what in greenhouses at various times of the year. If I ever go on garden tours or get to speak to gardeners when I visit gardens, it is always about what stays in the ground over winter and what goes in the greenhouses and if they are heated and how cold or wet it gets in their area in winter and what soil conditions are like... for me garden visits are more about learning than looking at pretty plants but maybe it's just me
I think it would be interesting as a search for interesting plants for me (unless there's a display)! I used to visit a couple of greenhouses full of interesting cacti on lunch breaks at university. I'd also be interested in seeing lots of salvias or pelargoniums. But not necessarily someone's workplace. There's the hortus botanicus and the tropical butterfly garden at the zoo in Amsterdam which I enjoyed.. but those are also more like museums!