The Nostalgic Traveler: The Greenhouse

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Winston-Salem, Lemmaphyllum microphyllum, North Carolina, Paris, American art & tobacco baron R.J. Reynolds


 

Last June, I started this column by writing about my collection of vintage Paris travel guides. I wanted to think about travel without going anywhere and to think about the past and how a city was imagined for tourists over the last one hundred-plus years. I’ll end the column in a similar way: by not really going anywhere.

There’s a greenhouse in my North Carolina town. This greenhouse is located on the property of the Reynolds estate, the 1917 home of tobacco baron R.J. Reynolds, who established his company in 1875. When this southern American Great House was completed after five years of work, it was self-sufficient and included a model farm, village, and gardens spread on over 1,000 acres. Reynolds and his wife Katharine settled into life there. Today, the Reynolds name is attached to virtually everything in my adopted home of Winston-Salem: streets, schools, parks, you name it. The house is now a museum of American art.

At the time, it was an isolated country estate, and although today the road that leads from downtown to the house – “Reynolda Road” – is lined with suburban restaurants, shops, schools, churches, and community centers, there are stretches that still look like the country. Like the estate itself, the road is called “Reynolda” as a nod to Katharine Reynolds and her daughter Mary, a kind of fake Latin homage. I take this road to work, and when I look off towards wide fields and rolling hills, sometimes I have the sense that the country and the suburbs have merged, or that the suburbs are still shadowed by their rural past.

The greenhouse is a glass conservatory, a white skeleton of a building. On one side of it are gardens that have been redesigned according to the plans that landscape architect Thomas Sears created for Katharine between 1917 and 1921. And on the other side is Reynolda Village, a small shopping center comprising expensive housewares, jewelry, and clothing stores, as well as cafes, restaurants, and a day spa. This mini-mall has taken over buildings that were part of the original estate. This “village” was modeled on an English dairy farm and once housed employees, including the family’s chauffeur and stenographer, as well as a blacksmith shop, a school, a smokehouse, a post office, and other businesses that supported the house.

If you stand on the garden side of the conservatory, it seems at home, but from the other side, it looks out of place next to the shops, as if it has been dropped into the present day.
I entered the greenhouse through a small garden store on the shopping center side. The boutique was stocked with fancy gardening implements, decorative moss frogs, brass planters, little bags of seeds, and decorative soaps. The air inside the shop smelled of scented candles, but as I walked into the conservatory, the odor of artificial wax dissolved, and the air smelled of water, leaves, and tropical flowers. It was hot and damp, foggy with spray that periodically filled the space from timed misting nozzles.

Conservatories bring to mind the Great Exhibitions of the nineteenth century, where technological advancements and objects from all over the world were displayed as symbols of empire. They also recall the lost shopping arcades and glass passageways of Paris, few of which remained after Baron Haussmann’s redesign of the city. These were quasi-magical spaces, enclosed glass worlds set apart from the city streets. Places of leisure and consumption. Places to be seen.

In a conservatory, you feel both indoors and out, and it’s hard to figure out where you are. I was in a cultivated universe, natural and artificial.

Baskets of plants hung from the ceiling, and cacti drooped down to the floor like link sausages. The metal blinds were drawn partially over the roof for shade. The blinds cut the sunlight as it entered the space, dividing it into ordered, glowing rows. A portable radio sat on a potting station, scattered with buckets of soil and nametags. I passed orchids, herbs, and planters filled with sand.

There was no one else there, and I felt pleasantly alone, with only the whirring of fans and the hissing of the misters. It was hot – even hotter than the muggy day outside the greenhouse.

Like many greenhouses, this one housed a collection of plants that couldn’t survive outside of a controlled environment. I read the plants’ names, and although most of them were no more than a foreign language – Pyrrosia lingua v. lacerata, Lemmaphyllum microphyllum, Drosera sp. Sundew Plant, Davallia heterophylia, and Drooping Tonguefern Elaphoglossum herminieri – I understood that they were things from elsewhere. The Drooping Tonguefern came from Puerto Rico. A Eucharis Lily, from the Andes of Colombia.

I have often asked myself why I’m drawn to the nostalgic places I have visited for this column. In part, they remind me that I’m bound by time. By allowing me a glimpse of something lost, I feel the present more strongly.

I didn’t want to move to Winston-Salem; I moved for my job, as academics generally do. And as the years have passed, and I have found that somehow I’m still here, I have needed to get away, so I have driven to the mountains or into the tobacco fields beyond the city. When I started this series, it was, in part, to get away. I wanted to see things that were part of a cultural past beyond myself – and things that helped me to think about my own past and how I have ended up in this unexpected present.

The conservatory felt like a place-less place. A timeless place. The kind of place I like.

I looked over the plants’ identifying signs, stuck in the soil. The conservatory brought together parts of different landscapes, creating a patchwork of nature, an impossible nature. It was a world of displaced things that had been relocated to this glass bubble.

As I walked out, I thought that I should come here more often. Maybe I will.

 


 

Susan Harlan is an English professor at Wake Forest University, where she specializes in Shakespeare. Her essays have appeared in venues such as The Awl, The Guardian US, Curbed National, The Toast, Roads & Kingdoms, The Morning News, Skirt!, and Public Books. She wrote a ten-part series for Nowhere called “The Nostalgic Traveler” that considers how objects and places both connect and alienate us from the past.

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