Ruth Kassinger - Paradise Under Glass: An Amateur Creates a Conservatory Garden

For Ted, and in memory of Joan Huber Good

I was sitting at the breakfast table in the conservatory this morning, looking out the window and watching the wind blow puffs of snow off the roof, when a kumquat, deep orange and the size of a large grape, fell off a tree and rolled across the limestone floor. Scotia, our white West Highland terrier, who was lying in a wicker armchair with her head on her paws, saw it, too. Before I could open my mouth, she launched herself off the chair like a swimmer out of the blocks, snapped it up, and swallowed it whole.

Many, many are the pleasures of an indoor garden in a cold climate. Mostly, they are visual ones. I look around me. I have eight hanging baskets: orange, goldfish-shaped Nematanthus flowers are brilliant against the mat of their plump, deep green leaves; the Boston ferns sport thick manes of bright green, serrated fronds; and the winter jasmine has a blizzard of starry, white flowers that nod in the light breeze of the overhead fans. My two travelers palms brush the skylights with their giant canoe-paddle leaves, and Juncus spiralis, a wiry marsh grass, corkscrews up from shallow planters on the floor. There are aromatic pleasures, too. The Calamondin orange, Meyer lemon, and key lime trees are in bloom, and the scent of their small, white flowers is sweet and piercing. Still, I have to say, and I assume Scotia would back me up, a kumquat fresh off the tree in February is a delight without compare.

I call this room a conservatory, but others might call it a sunroom or a Florida room. In the nineteenth century, if it had been many times larger, it would have been called a wintergarden. The room is an addition we had built in the angle between the two wings of our old house in suburban Maryland. Its walls and roof are of standard two-by-four construction, and the outside is sheathed in white-painted shingles to match the rest of the house. Glass fills the walls: the windows on the long side are ten feet tall, and the shorter wall is one large bay window. More than half the ceiling is open to light, thanks to twelve skylights in the roof. Two overhead fans keep the air moving. A pale blue wirework dining table with six chairs and the wicker armchairScotias chairare the only pieces of furniture. For the most part, the space is furnishedTed, my husband, might say overfurnishedwith plants.

Most of my plants are thriving. The tall, green-leafed plantsa dragon tree Dracaena, an umbrella tree, four bird-of-paradise, a batwing Alocasia , and a cutleaf Philodendron, among othersare doing very well. In pots on the floor, I have a collection of Anthurium, Dieffenbachia, and an assortment of begonias whose pink, green, and chocolate leaves are wildly patterned in polka dots, swirls, and rays. Three varieties of Streptocarpus with their small and velvety, blue, red, and purple flowers dress the windowsills. Because it is winter, my collection of ten citrus, guava, and other tropical fruit trees and bushes is clustered under two pairs of grow lights. A coffee bush, a fig, a large jade plant, several cactus, and a pineapple plant, which to my astonishment has sent a pineapple skyward, are lodging in the bay window. One wall is completely carpeted in plants. Ted might have a point.

All is not success, though, and I am sorry to see that some plants are looking tired, and some that could have flowers do not. This is because, in part, I am still new to indoor gardening, and I keep experimenting, choosing among the hundreds of tropical and semitropical plants that could, hypothetically, grow indoors. I am still having trouble accepting the fact that my conservatory is north-facing and partially shaded from the best southern sun by the second floor of our house, and so is not well suited to high-light plants. Although I have learned to stay away from plants with tags that read requires full sun, I am fundamentally an optimist, and if a plant promises brilliant flowers and calls for partial sun, I will take a chance. Sometimes these plants work; sometimes they dont. I wasnt so venturesome when I started out, but Ive learned by now to deal with losses.

There is another reason for some of my failures: until I stocked this conservatory, I had no gardening experience of any kind, either outdoors or in. Many of my friends and my familyTed, an avid outdoor gardener, in particularare amazed that I set out to create a conservatory and that I have had any success at all. Frankly, so am I.

It isnt that I dont appreciate gardens. I do, and always have. I grew up in Baltimore, and when my sister, Joanie, and I were young, my parents took us to all the public gardens. There was Sherwood Gardens where we went every April to see the tulips, Cylburn Park where we picnicked among blue and yellow wildflowers, and Druid Hill Park, near my grandparents apartment, where we strolled around the reservoir and admired the flowers and the fountain that at night changed colors. Now, when Ted and I travel, we often visit the local botanical gardens. Our house is just a mile outside Washington, D.C., and we occasionally ride bikes in the National Arboretum and walk through the gardens at Dumbarton Oaks. Longwood Gardens in Kennet Square, Pennsylvania, Winterthur Garden in Delaware, and Ladew Topiary Gardens in Monkton, Maryland, are an easy drive.

Enjoying a garden and creating one, however, have always been completely unrelated activities to my mind. Ted, who will jot down names of shrubs and plants he sees so he can investigate whether they might work in our backyard, has never understood my attitude. I enjoy going to museums and concerts, I tell him, but that doesnt mean I go home and want to pick up a paintbrush or a clarinet. No, I have always been perfectly content to appreciate the expert efforts of others. The urge to pick up a trowel, much less a shovel, or even a pair of clippers never struck me, at least not until recently.

So what inspired me to build a conservatory?

One winter four years ago, I briefly held a consulting job at an office on Capitol Hill. Walking to the Metro station to go home one late afternoon, I was in a gloomy mood. Our oldest daughter, Anna, had left for college on the West Coast, and Austen, a high school senior, was filling out college applications. Our youngest, Alice, was thirteen and seemed especially eager to grow up. She was so busy with school and sports, homework and her social life, we were often reduced to communicating by text message. Where had our little girls gone, the wide-eyed toddlers with their pixie haircuts who tracked my every movement, dripped juice on the kitchen floor and spilled tears when I took their drawings off the refrigerator (only to make room for new drawings!), and told me solemnly, each one, that they would never ever ever leave home? And where was that young mother who failed to get those promises in writing andhow could I have been so foolish?daydreamed from time to time of the day when her thoughts would not revolve around those little girls?

In a different universe of loss, Joanie had died of a brain tumor in February a year earlier. She had been my best friend and my older girls special aunt, the looser, cooler version of their mother. She was the brunette with the fierce blue eyes and the traffic-stopping figure who had Roller-bladed around our staid neighborhood dressed in shiny aqua leggings and a leotard, pushing Alice in her stroller. For decades, Joanie and I talked several times a week and, during certain stretchesduring one of Joanies boyfriend crises, for exampleevery day. We had long ago decided we would always visit our aging parents together. It had all been planned.