You Grow Girl™

Yesterday we went to the Allan Gardens Conservatory in the east end of Toronto. It's hard to believe * that I've lived in this city for 10 years, and I've even walked by this greenhouse, yet I didn't know it was open to the public. Not only that, but it's FREE!

I truly wasn't expecting it to be as good as it was. I mean it was no Montreal Botanical Gardens, but the Arid Room alone wasn't half bad at all. In fact it was just plain beautiful.

We entered the building through the main entrance which is the Palm House. It was filled with lots of giant tropical trees and plants including a VERY large devil's ivy (Epipremnum aureum). I took the photo with my hand on a leaf so you could see the size of it. That orangey looking thing is the vine. It was about as big around as my finger!

We moved north to the Tropical Landscape House. My favourite parts of this room were the jasmine plants (which were blooming with smellerific flowers) and a small pond covered in duckweed. I moved rather quickly through this room because I was most excited to get to the next room, The Arid House.

The Arid House was the hottest room I've ever been in. I'd swear it was worse than the desert at midday. The first thing I saw upon entering the room was a giant Pachypodium. Lately, while inspecting my own small-sized pachypodium, I have wondered what a full-sized tree is like. My friend J speculated that perhaps the spines on the trunk were large enough that you could impale a person on them. That would make sense in comparison to the size ratio of my small plant to a full-sized one. But you'd think if that was the case, that the tree would have a nickname such as "Death Tree" and that there would be some kind of storyline in action films such as those of the "Indian Jones" series in which "bad guys" were flung towards large Pachypodium trees somewhere in Madagascar. I was happy to discover that the spines aren't much larger than those on a small plant and that they are spaced much further apart as well. So it's not the deadly tree I thought it would be -- but it could still inflict some major damage. And to top it off the plant was flowering!

Some other highlights of the room included a plant I have never seen before called a velvet leaf plant that had large leaves that really are soft and fuzzy like velvet, a lovely assortment of agaves in all shapes sizes and colours, a giant opuntia in full bloom laden with large, yellow flowers and aloes as big as trees with bark as hard as a real tree trunk.

Following the Arid House we backtracked through the Tropical Landscape House and it felt cool and refreshing after the intense dry heat of the Arid House.

Our next destination was the Cool Temperatures House on the south side of the main entrance. The most exciting plants in this room was a large fig tree that was filled with small, developing figs, a gardenia with super smelling flowers and what I believe was a tree fern.

The final and largest room was the Tropical Houses. The first section I came upon was an assortment of bromeliads and other epiphytic plants including an extremely large night blooming 'Queen of the Night' jungle cactus. It was covered in flower buds, but sadly because it blooms at night we were unable to see any that were open. Rooms like this make me long for a greenhouse of my own simply because of the way the bromeliads are displayed growing on trees the way they are supposed to. It's a much nicer way to see them rather than like specimens in pots. My favourite bromeliads are the ones with large cups that have algae forming in them. They're like minature ponds inside a plant. The orchid selection wasn't super exciting. Maybe it was the wrong time of year but I found only one or two that were in bloom. I still like to look at the foliage and the long, dangling roots. I was most happy to see that some of their orchids had little spots on the leaves like my 'Sharry Baby' Oncidium does. If I see that sort of thing in a greenhouse, then I tend to stop worrying about it. It's comforting to know that even under ideal conditions perfection isn't always acquired.

There were so many other cool things in this room I don't know where to begin. They had several large staghorn ferns on display (one with spores on it proving that I definitely had scale insect and not spores growing on my plant) and a really cool hares foot fern (Polypodium aureum). There were several varieties of passionflower growing in this room including two in full bloom that I had only ever seen in photographs. I really liked the red flower but if I had to choose I think I'm still more partial to my own passionflower.

This plant really amazed me. When the leaves are just developing they look like green bananas. The leaves are huge and really textured on the underside. The bark looks like it is covered in owl eyes.

The thing I liked best about Allan Gardens Conservatory was the informal nature of the place. Because it is free, there was no one around. Even on a Sunday only a handful of patrons came through the place in the time we were there, and we only saw one person working. It didn't feel like everything was locked up out of reach. Maybe that's not a good thing for the plants but since so many of them are very tactile, it was nice to be able to touch the leaves and really inspect them rather than gazing from a distance.

I took nearly 200 photos on our trip through the greenhouse and used 16 of my favourites in a poster that I designed and put for sale on cafepress.