It’s time to forget the sugarplums. Indulge your senses, instead, at the new Orangery at Denver Botanic Gardens.
Take in the beauty and fragrance of winter-defying plants ranging from grapefruit to gardenia in this cheery new expansion of the gardens’ iconic greenhouse.
The Orangery, a glassy and classy horticultural corridor, is the latest — and perhaps finest — fruit borne of the gardens’ capital campaign.
“Of all the new construction, this is my favorite spot,” said Sarada Krishnan, the gardens’ director of horticulture.
Panayoti Kelaides, a senior plantsman who recently celebrated his 30th year with the gardens, seconded that. “I love the Orangery,” he said. “Who doesn’t?”
Orangeries originally blossomed in Renaissance Italian gardens. Developments in glass-making technology allowed the manufacturing of ample expanses of glass. The spaces the glass enclosed were in that era heated with stoves or open fires to keeo tender, exotic plants warm over cold Northern European winters. Orangeries grew as a prestigious trend among the wealthy.
“To my mind, the term suggests the enormous, collonaded, neoclassical structures one sees at (Great Britain’s) Kew or Edinburgh . . . big enough for mature oranges to stretch up,” Kelaidis said.
“I see ours as more of an arcade. It provides a wonderful transition between steamy greenhouses and the out of doors.”
The Denver orangery is rooted in a plan to make greenhouse operations more transparent. A long and narrow space, its form follows function.
“During design of the greenhouses, we were wondering how to make visitor-interface space visually attractive, rather than have the working greenhouses right in the face of visitors,” Krishnan said.
“We came up with the idea of the orangery separating the greenhouses from the gardens, creating an attractive interface that allows visitors to look into the greenhouses and see what it takes, behind the scenes, to have diverse botanic gardens.”
The orangery’s series of garage-like doors will remain open during temperate times of the year. The indoor-outdoor space will allow citrus trees to be wheeled outdoors onto a terrace in summer to soak up the full sun that the plants relish.
The defining elements in an orangery, of course, are oranges. The orangery’s citrus collection also includes large containerized trees bearing grapefruits, limes, lemons, tangerines, blood oranges, tangelos and finger citron.
History’s most ambitious orangery belonged to France’s King Louis XIV, whose Versailles gardens included 3,000 orange trees.
So Krishnan gathered images of traditional Versailles planter boxes to inspire metalworker Jesse Groff with The Roofing Company, located in Granby.
Groff crafted the customized planter boxes out of powder-coated steel and painted white oak slats. He created 20 square planters that contain permanent installations. The garden’s horticulturalists will freshen up the twelve rectangular planters seasonally — six times in 2011 alone, Krishnan said.
“We are in the process of acquiring a camellia collection, which, when blooming, will be featured in these square planters,” Krishan said.
Aromatherapists associate citrus scents with joy. In the orangery, benches offer strollers the opportunity to sit and catch their breath. With a touch of appealing humidity in the air, the perfume of flowers, and the assortment of colors, the orangery can help melt the midwinter blues.
Colleen Smith’s first novel, “Glass Halo,” was a finalist for the 2010 Sante Fe Literary Prize.
