The workers moved fast and were focused, speaking only when absolutely necessary.
Some brushed sweat from their faces as they stacked potted orchids into crates, which were loaded onto carts and rushed out to waiting trucks.
At times, the aisles in the Orchid House were a gridlock of fragile flowers moving from greenhouses at the Denver Botanic Gardens on York Street to new hothouses at the Botanic Gardens’ Chatfield site.
The 2,500 orchids are the first portion of the 43-year-old horticultural collection to be moved, a laborious process that will take a month.
When the move is complete, more than 5,000 plants will have been transferred from six greenhouses built more than 40 years ago. The old greenhouses will be demolished next month and replaced next year with a $12 million complex that has 12 climate-controlled zones.
The new construction is part of the bond package that voters passed in 2007, which gave $18.6 million to the Denver Botanic Gardens.
“Some people may think, ‘These are just plants; why should we care?’ ” said horticulture director Sarada Krishnan. “But for us, it’s a living museum.”
Each plant is like an art object in a museum collection, each piece affixed with a tag linking it to a database entry detailing its provenance — the history of the plant, when and where it was purchased. The movers must take care not to lose a single database tag.
“If we lose the documentation and can’t identify the plant, the value of the collection goes down,” Krishnan said.
The hothouses serve a number of purposes. New plants are grown there from seeds and later transferred to the gardens. Other plants are in storage, to be whisked out to the gardens if another plant gets sick or needs to be replaced.
Researchers also bring back plants from distant lands such as Mongolia and propagate them in the greenhouse. If they thrive, these plants may be introduced to local nurseries.
The gardens’ administration had considered renting local greenhouse space to temporarily house the collection. But the cost was about $7,000 a month, so the staff decided to build new greenhouses at Chatfield, about 20 miles south of the York Street gardens, that can later be reused to extend existing programs.
The old greenhouses, with their untempered glass roofs, “weren’t safe,” Krishnan said.
The new greenhouses will be built with tempered glass, so the public will finally be allowed into the greenhouses to see how the plants are propagated.
Once the orchids are gone, workers will start on a jungle of palm trees, some weighing more than 300 pounds. Others have hidden thorns or are rooted into the ground.
Everything must be moved: tools, potting mix, fertilizer, even the orchid benches.
But those benches — custom designed and built inside the greenhouses — won’t fit through the doors, so workers will knock out the back wall this week and extract the benches from there.
On Monday, the first morning of the move, the staff started at 7 a.m., loading a minivan and two trucks.
It took about three hours per load, including loading time and the 90-minute round-trip drive.
Even though the plants are moved with tenderness, there is still hardship.
“The plants will be in transplant shock,” Krishnan said. “They need to be pampered in their new environment.”
Colleen O’Connor: 303-954-1083 or coconnor@denverpost.com
