When the cost of heating soared, I feared a rise in the cost of half-hardy bedding plants. I then thought less selfishly and feared for botanic gardens, tied in to heated glasshouses, those living machines for plants from temperate and tropical climes. They are works of art and craft, but their heating systems derive from engineering 100 years old or more, devised when waste and carbon were not primary concerns.
Imagine the challenge for London’s Kew Gardens, whose enormous Palm House, built in the 1840s, is an architectural wonder. It has to be kept to a temperature of at least 18C. Since 2021, its system’s efficiency has been improved, but an approach to being “carbon positive” is some years in the future. Kew’s sustainability strategy schedules it by 2030 and its attainment will be very expensive.
Kew’s beautiful Temperate House also has to be kept above 10C. Its first architects’ solution was to set huge pipes in the building’s pillars and walls and to build big boilers to power steam through them. During the house’s recent restoration, these pipes were revealed, but were then bypassed by new pipes set in trenches in the ground. They are warmed by biomass heating, fed on sterile woodchips.
In New York, the Botanical Garden’s Enid A Haupt Conservatory and its magnificent dome have posed similar challenges since their completion in 1902. Recent restorations have attended to the glass, fine pillars and so forth, and the heating systems have been made more efficient, but here too a replacement with geothermal heating is a massive project, likely to run on into 2030 and beyond.
Meanwhile I have just seen a net-positive plan being inaugurated. On a blustery Florida morning, before a midweek audience of 400, Sarasota’s choral singers began the occasion at Marie Selby Botanical Gardens in front of the new Living Energy Access Facility. The LEAF includes The Green Orchid, billed as the world’s first net-positive restaurant, and a newly built car park beside it whose visitors’ carbon is countered by rooftop solar panels and the surplus they contribute to the city’s electric grid.
The choir’s opening number was “America the Beautiful”, a song which fundraisers for British botanical gardens would have to endorse. The Selby project is privately funded. The appeal for its Phase 1’s finance began in 2019 and raised the necessary $57mn from about 3,500 donors. Phase 2, an integrated part of the green plan, is already receiving pledges which will build new greenhouses for Selby’s temperate and tropical plants.
Things grow fast in Florida. The new car park’s facade is prefaced by climbing plants, set into the ground below sections of long wire, three at a time, fixed in front of, not into, the wall so as to support a green curtain in front of it. This ingenious system avoids nails and netting on the building itself and is the work of Jakob Systems, specialists in support systems for gardens. Scarlet-flowered honeysuckles, passion flowers and Mexican flame vines mix with jasmines and are already 6ft or more on their way to the upper storey. They have been in the ground for only six weeks.
The garden’s own beneficent hurricane, its CEO and president Jennifer Rominiecki, welcomed us with her personal mantra, “Scale over those obstacles and keep on keeping on.” The new scheme and its buildings are testimonies to it. The first spade went into the ground in June 2021. When I saw an early stage of construction in 2022, the tallest presence on site was a big Bunya-Bunya tree, a relative of the Monkey Puzzle, whose water- capturing lower trunk looked swollen and lonely among all the concrete and rubble. Now it fits, alive and well, into an elegant ground-plan complete with a water-lily canal and a pattern of flowery beds, devised by Richard Roark of Philadelphia-based Olin Studio. He has even designed the Gulf Coast-inspired garden in the grounds of the US embassy in London. At Selby I watched while 1,400 visitors in the first hour of Members’ Day flowed smoothly through his ground plan.
In central Sarasota, the Marie Selby garden has few of the challenges confronting Kew’s drive for sustainability. It is in an area of high sunshine throughout the year, making solar power an apt solution. It is smaller and is not the custodian of historic glass housing. It needs anyway to build new storm-resistant homes for its orchids and bromeliads, especially the epiphytic orchids which grow above ground level on trees. Selby’s collection of them is the biggest scientifically documented collection. Beside the bay, it is at constant risk of hurricanes.
Inside one of the dilapidated glass houses I had a preview of what will go on eco-display in Phase 2. Pitcairnias and Tillandsias are the two largest genera in the family of bromeliads and I saw flowers on one of the best of each. When not at Selby, rare Pitcairnia rubronigriflora is at home in north Peru and has stems with red flowers, tending to black, and a yellow mouth, tiny but enough to attract pollinating hummingbirds. Tillandsias will even grow on wood, their roots open to the air. They are houseplants of the future, hookable on to walls, even in rooms of variable heating: I was lucky enough to coincide with Tillandsia bulbosa whose flowers are an electric blend of blue and red. The genus has about 200 members of which Selby has about 120, the biggest botanical collection.
In Phase 1, Selby’s research facilities and herbarium have all been rehoused, carbon neutrally, in new rooms. In his new domain I reflected with Bruce Holst, the vice-president for botany, on the ill-thought rhetoric that botanic gardens are hotbeds of colonialism. Empire and colonial power have been one element in the histories of some of them, but now the mission is collaborative, conducted with knowledgeable botanists in other countries. Holst has special praise for Cuba’s botanists and for those he will meet at next month’s Botanical Bridges Congress on botanic gardens’ role in conserving Caribbean plant diversity, to be held, open to all, in Colombia.
The walls of the new research building include blocks of limestone set with ancient fossils. Purple-flowered vanda orchids hang on wires from the welcome space’s roof. Above The Green Orchid restaurant, Sarasota’s Eco- vets are growing vegetables in beds held up by corrugated iron. They are veteran soldiers, supervising others whose mental health has been affected by service, and the containers are about 4ft deep, a counter to the intense heat of summer on a Sarasotan roof. The heat will not be so intense for deeply rooted vegetables and they are better able to survive it. As the world warms we can learn from the Eco-vets. I coincided with their first freshly picked radishes, sent from roof to table.
In the new boardrooms, the tabletops have been cleverly cut and planed from the wood of trees blown over in local storms. I admired the beauty of the patterns in Indian mahogany and in lengths of local oak. The edges have been cut unevenly to leave a rift between the two halves when laid horizontally. I recommend the craft to boardrooms. During meetings participants have a rift to absorb them, the gap in the eco-table at which the directors sit.
Robin Lane Fox travelled as a guest of the Marie Selby Botanical Gardens
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