It may not be the first English garden you’d associate with a Palm House, but Sefton Park has one of the prettiest. These tiered buildings hark back to times when palm trees were enough of a curiosity to justify building a magnificent structure to keep palms alive through our winters.
Our most famous Palm House is at Kew where immaculate bedding plants in shaped island beds layer on the traditional effect.
Bodnant Garden, in Wales, has a dinky version, not open to the public. More of a conservatory, perhaps they’d say.
Before I move on from Palm Houses, I should explain that the reason for today’s garden gallery is Anne Sandler’s Lens-Artists Challenge: Buildings and Other Structures, although I may not be approaching it in exactly the right spirit.
Greenhouses have to share their limelight when I take pictures.
You’d think a giant, cylinder-shaped glasshouse would have been enough to command my full attention, but I remember being entranced by waving ornamental grasses. Luckily, a picture can do more than one thing – and if your eye can stay tethered to the glasshouses, well done to you. Here are some to experiment with:
The greenhouses above and below are at flower shows, so canny greenhouse marketing teams have laid out plants to lure us toward their products, as if we were human bees. It worked for me, though I have neither room nor budget to be a target customer.
I’ll leave you with this, just to show I can do it, once every five years or so.
Susan Rushton 
Yes, yours was definitely the right spirit. As we would say in Maine, those are some structures. My eye was definitely drawn to the waving grass.
The grass is a scene-stealer. Some of these are more like greenvillages than greenhouses.
What an interesting post. Makes you think really; gardens and greenhouses are both made things.
I’m glad you enjoyed it.
I love how egalitarian this is – the big and the small, the grand and the homely.
I wouldn’t imagine any of these are cheap, although you’re right that I did try to include a mix.
The Palm Houses are breathtaking! I would love to see the insides. However, I was truly surprised to see our local Myriad Gardens in Oklahoma City in your post! I’m glad you had a caption with it because at first I thought “Hmm. Someone else has a cylindrical greenhouse? Interesting!” As always your photos are so fun to see!
We were there a few years ago for a lecture. I remember enjoying the variety of trees in the city.
GREAT take on the theme. Glass/green-house architecture is a style of its own. Well done.
Thanks, John.
I love that you took the theme to the gardens. Well done. The Palm Houses and Greenhouses you have visited are so picturesque. My favorite is the Gabriel Ash Greenhouses.
And yes…attract us as if we were human bees. Indeed!
That one would satisfy most people’s needs.
You made my morning, Susan. What a wonderful collection. I love greenhouses!
Dad used to have a tiny, rickety glasshouse, pulled down long ago. I wish I had a photo of that!
These glasshouses are lovely – I’ve always loved that combination of glass and plants. (Especially the curvy styles of Sefton Park and Kew.) I used to spend quite a lot of time in the glasshouses at Edinburgh’s RBG.
Any curvy building is special. It’s as if our minds play around with calculating the strains that seem inherent in the form without our really noticing.