Nobody planted this
Between 1981 and 2009 the glasshouse was open to the sky through a broken pane, and it filled itself. When we took the lease we intended to clear it out. We spent one winter in there and changed our minds.
We did not build this. We keep the roof on.
A glasshouse that became a forest
The building changed slowly, then all at once. These are the moments that made the sanctuary what it is now.
1889 to 1974
The nursery years
A nursery firm built the palm house in 1889 to grow stock they could not overwinter outdoors. Sixty-two metres long, heated by two coal boilers under the floor.
It worked for eighty-five years. The firm closed it when the 1973 oil price made the heating cost more than the plants were worth. In 1974 they locked it and left.
1974 to 2009
Empty
A roof pane came down in a storm in the winter of 1981, and after that it rained inside. Nobody planted anything.
The council listed the ironwork in 1994, which is the only reason the building was not demolished, and also the reason nobody could afford to do anything with it.
2009
The lease
What Nadia and Tomás found: fourteen metres of self-seeded canopy, a floor that had become soil, and a microclimate holding above 14 degrees in February with no heating running at all.
The building had become good at being a forest. They took the lease between them with a plan to clear the interior and start properly, spent one winter inside, and changed their minds.
2011
Open two days a week
The doors opened two days a week while the paths settled and the team learned how people moved through a building the planting had already claimed.
2014
The Drowsebirds arrive
A private collection two counties over was given up, and twelve Painted Drowsebirds came to the glasshouse because there was nowhere else warm enough.
They had been bred in captivity for four generations and could not be released. Quarantine for ninety days in the north range, then out into the canopy.
2016
The first Drowse session
It started as a staff observation window and was not meant to be public. One afternoon the doors stayed open and the visitors already inside stayed. It has run every day since.
Now
Four sessions
Thirty-one staff and volunteers, one boiler, and a roof that costs more every year than everything else combined.
Who runs it
The portraits are illustrations rather than photographs, deliberately. These are invented people and the drawings keep that distinction clear.
Dr. Nadia Aliyeva
Studies torpor and sleep architecture in small birds. She was told the glasshouse was a distraction from her actual work for about six years, and then her actual work moved into the glasshouse.
Illustrated portrait of an invented person.
Tomás Peralta
Has run glasshouses since he was nineteen. He describes his job here as arguing with a building that has already decided what it wants to be, and mostly losing.
Illustrated portrait of an invented person.