When one thinks of plants inside buildings, one immediately thinks of tall, ornate greenhouses crammed with long-leafed birds of paradise, with condensation dripping down the glass. These grand structures haven’t always been around though, and their history is an interesting one.
There are a few theories about their origin, one of which takes us all the way back to first-century Rome. Where a rather sickly Emperor Tiberius was told by his physicians that for his health, he would need to eat a cucumber a day. Now despite what our year-round fully stocked supermarkets tell us, most fruits or vegetables are seasonal and so poor Tiberius was faced with a predicament: How do we grow cucumbers year-round? His engineers began brainstorming and they came across a solution. It was basically a garden bed mounted on wheels that they would roll out into the sun and on wintry days they would cover it with a transparent stone roof. Otherwise known as a specularia, these would eventually evolve into what we know today as a greenhouse.
Another fork in the evolution of the greenhouse, brings the avid time traveller to 13nth Century Italy. The country was going through an economic and explorative boom. Voyagers from around the world started bringing back plant specimens that would need an environment that would mimic the biomes of North Africa and the Middle East. Citrus was one such luxury commodity and was prized as exotic “golden apples”. In order to keep these trees alive and growing, protected enclosures or structures called limonaie (lemon houses) or later orangeries were built. In some instances, wooden frames, glass, and cloth coverings would effectively turn them in greenhouses. And on very cold nights, fires were lit to provide the shocked trees with some comfort.
The taste for these finer exotic fruits spread throughout Europe and during the renaissance, with a thriving economy and a taste for knowledge, greenhouses became more popular, especially as it was seen as a symbol of wealth to own one. The palace of Versailles had an orangerie that was built to house over a thousand trees in winter
The real hurrah, while watching humanities greenhouse race, occurred in the 19nth century during the Industrial Revolution. Iron and glass were able to be produced en masse and at cheaper rates. And so, expansive structures could now be built that maximised light for plants that needed it. This period of time also saw central heating systems formalsing so that consistent temperatures could be maintained year round. The Industrial Revolution famously also had averse effects on society where people became more and more removed from nature, with pollution and deforestation abundant. This saw a rise in the need for people to reconnect with the living world and places like the Palm House in Kew, Britain, would attract hundreds of visitors. This desire to reconnect has perhaps always been present, and greenhouses have been in some ways the vehicle in which to do so.
