Conservatory: To Capture Eden In A Jar

Alabaster stone steps with a stone-carved railing must be mounted to reach the doors of the glass palace. The summer sun shines down on the hundreds of windows, winking and flashing off them like glimmers of bright magic. The metal window frames form an immense white latticework up the shining walls and across the pointed peaks and great curving dome of the roof. From within, a vague green mass is visible.

Excepting the door guard, no one lingers in the small cube-shaped vestibule. Walled and roofed with square pieces of glass, framed and floored with white, designed and destined never to be frequented for long. This little room feels empty, cool, sterile, and still, despite all the transient beings who move through it and the sunlight pouring in.

A few more steps, and the floor is now made up of rectangular, warm-toned beige stone blocks.

But for the moment, the floor becomes inconsequential. I have entered the glass palace proper, and what it contains is nearly unbelievable.

Trees. Entire trees grow here under the great glass dome. The blinding sun glare seen from without is not visible from within. Instead, I can look up through towering trees to windows framing blue sky and white clouds. Inside the glass roof, the air is warm and humid. I don’t usually like to feel so warm, but it is a small sacrifice to make while visiting this glorious place.

A rather short palm tree leans over the entrance from one of the waist-high stone planter beds. Its long stems droop with the weight of the bright green fronds arranged like enormous fans, each big enough to cover a car’s windshield. A little sign held to the pale, gray-brown trunk with a wrap-around wire reads Chinese Fan Palm, Livistona chinensis.

I step closer so I am under it and run my eyes from the base of the tree, where it disappears into dark soil, up into the fans, where light shines through. I’ve never heard of this species, but I think I might know where in China it grows wild.

The Siyi is another name for the Pearl River Delta in Southern China. Many men left the villages in that delta in the 1860s to travel to the United States of America, which they called the flowery flag nation or Gold Mountain. The steamers they bought passage on brought them to San Francisco, California. The Chinese men came looking for work so they could send money home to their families. Some became gold prospectors, others silver miners, others railroad workers. The ones who were hired by the Central Pacific Railroad company were instrumental in perhaps one of the greatest works in the age of steam: The building of the Transcontinental Railroad, the tracks that connected the States from East to West, sea to shining sea. “We cannot do without them,” one of the highest-ranking men in the company wrote of the Chinese.

Is this the kind of tree men of the Siyi knew? Was it as familiar to them as birches, maples, pines, and spruces are to me?

The stone path curves away beneath my feet, beckoning me on, inviting me to discover what lies ahead. My mother has told me gardening books recommend never leaving a garden path straight, but curving it to evoke a sense of mystery. I leave the fan palm from China and continue on my way.

In my house I have umbrella plants growing from a pot. Now I see a giant version of the plant, as big as a tree. The thin woody stems I have at home are magnified to birch tree width here. The leaves that are finger-length on my potted plant look as if they’re as long as my arm up there, though it’s hard to tell when they’re so high above my head. If there was wind in here to sway them, I believe the movement of umbrella trees would be lovely to watch.

Delicate orchids can be found in small pots wired to palm trunks, high enough to be out of reach of small children who explore their world with their hands. Bromeliad plants are tucked in among the bases of various trees. I know their name, can recognize them, because I remember that Strawberry Poison Dart frogs deposit their tadpoles in the tiny natural water wells bromeliads collect. Perhaps I remember because that particular poison dart frog is red, which used to be my favorite color.

Now my favorite color is green, and I am surrounded by it. Everything in here draws my eye and my wonder and my smile. The space feels alive, but in an odd way. It reminds me of how I used to feel when I’d catch a small creature and put it in a jar. It would flap, hop, move, and my chest and breath would feel tight as I watched them through transparent walls. I felt guilty, but I would keep butterflies and moths in peanut butter jars with nail-pierced lids until nightfall, reveling in my living possessions. The one big grasshopper I once imprisoned in a baby food jar with no air holes didn’t die of asphyxiation, to my grateful surprise. I remember it launching its strong self against the screwed-on metal lid with an audible pop, pop, pop, so hard I could feel it against my finger and wanted to avoid touching the little piece of metal, afraid the bug would pop the lid free and bite or sting me in anger, though I was mostly sure they were incapable of doing that. I took him far from where I caught him (the summer camp at which we were dropping off cousins) and released him in a place he could never reach on his own (halfway between my house and my grandmother’s). The stiff, matte-black body was lined with racing stripes of neon yellow, and the grasshopper showed strongly against the short green lawn of town. I wondered if I’d somehow doomed him, but didn’t think any grown-up would drive me all the way back to the summer camp just so I could release a grasshopper who I suddenly thought needed to go home.

I wonder if these trees and plants feel like that grasshopper: Nowhere to go, really, no matter how hard they try.

There’s a separate wing full of trees and plants that people have special uses for. Inside, a dark green vanilla vine climbs up the wall and is just shy of questing out the door into the wider dome. Even then, it could never escape. Not while gardeners are here to trim it back.

Orange, mango, cacao, and more trees share the label "useful" with the vanilla vine. Cacao trees blossom with minuscule white flowers, like many jungle plants. Those flowers must be pollinated by orange nectar bats to mature into waxy pods that look like orange, yellow, or purple deflated footballs. Those pods are full of cacao beans, with which we make chocolate. I can’t have my favorite candy without bats. I would probably never see a cacao tree in person if they did not have one here in the garden under glass.

The fern room is even wetter and warmer than the rest of the conservatory. As the name makes clear, it is full of many kinds of ferns. Tree ferns taller than me. Maidenhair and horsetail ferns which, my fascination with dinosaurs has taught me, were eaten by herbivorous dinosaurs, and so have survived quite a lot as a species before being planted in a glass box. Is this thick, warm air I have a little trouble breathing the same kind of air dinosaurs breathed? The books do tell me they had a warmer, wetter climate than we do now. Is this the air still found in tropical jungles and rainforests? Maybe. I don’t know. I can only experience it here in the conservatory.

There is one more special wing: the Sunken Garden. Two sets of steps lead down to a path bordering a long, straight-edged pool dotted with flowers that float or thrust up though the surface. More vibrant blossoms almost glow in beds and deep stone planting boxes. The room looks enchanted, like something from a fairytale. A lamp shaped like a giant star with many points hangs from the pointed glass roof.

Many people stroll these indoor forests and gardens, admiring the collection of plants from around the world that would never be so close together without human intervention.

Perhaps our hearts all long for the garden from the beginning, the place where man was set to care for creation, to be a subcreator, naming and tending.