Do you visit greenhouses?

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:

Don't open the garden in May?

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May 15, 2025

The Chelsea Flower Show is positioned at the end of May because that is rather a gap in the garden world.