In terms of innovation and development, the construction of glasshouses reached its zenith in the Victorian era, changing the way the country gardened – and ate – forever more
Statuesque, apparently well fed and a brilliant shade of jade green with flamboyant turquoise flashes on his substantial, if scaly, jowls, Lord Blechnum, a Chinese water dragon, isn’t the first character you’d expect to encounter in a glasshouse. One of eight such reptiles to have been employed in the Princess of Wales Conservatory at RBG Kew (kew.org), his mission has been innovative but singular: to keep the cockroaches under control.
“It’s not just Kew that has cockroaches,” says Fiona Inches, glasshouse manager on secondment to the Edinburgh Biomes Project at RBGE (rbge.org.uk). “If you have tropical glasshouses, I would be very surprised if you didn’t have cockroaches. They’re all living in the heating ducts here,” she notes wryly, hinting that the artisans currently working on the glasshouses’ substantial, seven-year-long restoration project will soon encounter a small horror.
For better or for worse, the cockroaches are somewhat heraldic of these august buildings. They represent a world within worlds, where specific climatic conditions, often warm and steamy but not always so, have been created to grow some of the rarest, most curious, educational, and even threatened plant species on the planet.
Serendipitous circumstances
It was Louis XIV of France who helped make growing under glass fashionable, keeping over a thousand orange trees, in what became known as Versailles planters, within the sheltered environs of the brick-and-glass buildings we now call orangeries. Some 200 years later, glasshouses reached their great Victorian peak, when they captured the imaginations of industrialists, engineers, botanists, plant collectors, artists and gardeners alike. This came about as a result of unrelated yet simultaneous events. “It was a moment in time,” observes Pam Smith, senior national curator for gardens and parkland at the National Trust (nationaltrust.org. uk). “It all happened over a period of 50 or 60 years, and it culminated in the glasshouses we have today.”
The catalyst was the Industrial Revolution, which brought new wealth to the Victorian upper classes and saw the growth of the middle class. Developments in glass manufacture and the r
