Creating paradise on earth has inspired the evolution of conservatories from Napoleonic France to Jeffersonian America. It is a story of taste, travel and technology. As world exploration increased in the 16th century, rare and beautiful plants made their way to Europe from the four corners of the globe. By the mid-18th century, industrial technology produced the iron and glass necessary for the full-scale development of conservatories. The Empress Josephine received the Tsar of all the Russias in her glass palace, where she exhibited the finest specimens of roses, orchids, palms and other delicate blooms. King George IV of England, Emperor Franz Joseph of Austria, countless aristocrats and the newly minted millionaires of the 19th century each created conservatories to grace their grand estates.

In the United States, the vast resources of a continent made their way into the design and improvement of conservatories throughout the Victorian Age. The honored place of nature in the 19th century made a major impact on the desire to use conservatories as a link between interiors and the out of doors. Conservatories appeared in the houses of the wealthy but also in public gardens and parks, for any city with civic pride and cultural aspirations featured an opulent glass building to showcase plants, ornamental trees and shrubs. Horticultural expertise and theatrical display combined to make these structures theaters of pure architectural fantasy. One conservatory might be in the classical style, another inspired by the Gothic. Never had practical technology and whimsical design been paired so successfully.

This illustrated lecture will feature conservatories across Europe and America in both private houses and public gardens. Period paintings, illustrations and photographs will bring these structures to life.

The pastoral beauty of verdant lawn, meadow and lofty trees as an idealized version of nature is at the very heart of the picturesque, which inspired landscape design in the Old World and New from the 18th century onward. Developed first in Britain by the capable hands of Lancelot “Capability” Brown, the English garden embraced the S shaped path, known as the “line of beauty,” the irregular layout of plantings and long vistas through stretches of grass unencumbered by the formal gardens, rigidly planned flower beds and precisely clipped trees of previous centuries. This natural style of landscape took Europe by storm and made its way to Colonial America, where it would find a population ready and able to capitalize on the picturesque in the crafting of a unique cultural identity in a nation where land was aplenty.

George Washington and Thomas Jefferson redesigned their landscapes in the prevailing taste for the picturesque. The American nurseryman and best-selling writer, Andrew Jackson Downing, popularized the pursuit of the natural in the new garden suburbs of the Victorian era. In a country defined by its open spaces, Frederick Law Olmsted became the father of modern landscape architecture, a proponent of the picturesque in public parks and private estates in numerous landmark designs such as New York’s Central Park, the system of green belts in Boston known as the Emerald Necklace, Biltmore House in North Carolina, the Hammersmith Farm in Newport, Rhode Island, and Stanford University in California.

Celebrated in art, poetry and prose, the picturesque extolled the virtue of the “genius of place.” This illustrated lecture will explore an extraordinary series of places, from parks to private gardens, demonstrating the key features of the picturesque landscape by its greatest masters.