A variety of succulents at Wave Hill in the Riverdale section of the Bronx.
Oh What Pretty Colors Blossom During The Winter In The Bronx
JANUARY is a time for gardeners in the North to take time out: to stand in a tropical world, looking at palm trees soaring toward glass domes, or, as I did the other day, step down into a warm, steamy sunken Victorian fernery, where hundreds of ferns of every imaginable shape and size thrive among rocks and waterfalls.
This sunken glasshouse was built in Philadelphia in 1899 by John Morris, an iron manufacturer. He erected it in the midst of the fern mania that was part of the Victorian plant craze sweeping the Western world as plant explorers returned bearing exotics from Asia, South America, Fiji and other mysterious places.
Morris, who had a degree in engineering, designed a sunken fernery unusual for its time: the curving glass roof was supported by wrought-iron roof braces, not columns, so it appeared to float over the walls of native Wissahickon stone and an otherworldly garden of rocks and ferns carefully arranged by Japanese landscapers.
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