 |
Winter garden :
a sliver of Tropical Forest in Burgundy
« Between 1780 and 1900, the passion for exotic flowers, the enthusiasm for rare plants, the taste for distant shores, the attraction of renewed nature are merged into a single passion - horticulture - and a single architectural style - greenhouses and winter gardens. Their remarkable expansion, beyond just simple fashion, was a true social phenomenon that spread gradually into the whole of French society.»
(La grande Histoire de Serres et des Jardins d’Hiver (The great History of Greenhouses and Winter Gardens), Ed. Graphite)
1663 : First orangery created by Le Vau at Versailles for the Sun King.
1780 : First Winter Garden constructed for the Duc de Chartres at his Monceau property by Thomas Blaikie, his Scots gardener.
1803 : First to be built in a town - the two greenhouses on the Passerelle des Arts (footbridge) in Paris.
1805 : Malmaison greenhouses, built by the architects Thibault and Vignon for Bonaparte's wife, Empress Joséphine de Beauharnais.
1833 : first greenhouses combining iron and glass built by Renault de Fleury for the Natural History Museum in Paris.
|
Many constructions followed, housing sumptuous plant collections owned by major bourgeois families, the star attraction in the Universal Exhibitions of the late 19th century
before becoming, finally, an essential attraction in the Botanical Parks and Public Gardens (Paris in 1856 at the Acclimatisation Garden and 1898 for the Fleuriste d'Auteil, Lyon in 1877-1882,
the Victoria greenhouse in Lyon in 1887, Bordeaux in
|
|
1856, Nantes in 1844, Lille in 1887, Rennes in 1863, Rouen, Montpellier, etc.).
|
2000 : Sens reopens 600 m2 of greenhouses containing tropical collections in its Moulin à Tan Park, thus extending a history initiated as early as 1970.
A forest at different levels
|
Forest of the clouds
Trees growing up to the forest roof (canopy) have tough, shiny leaves to counteract drying winds, sun and wide changes in temperature.
Shade plants
Undergrowth plants have large, hairy leaves. Their red pigmentation allows them to capture and use the very marginal light reaching the ground (1% of solar radiation). |
Growing up towards the light
Creepers germinate in the ground, remain as shrubs then twine themselves around other plants to reach the canopy and soak up the rays of light. They can thus remain hanging even if the support plant dies.
|
The earth's lung has run out of steam!
Why protect the rainforests?
It is estimated that the rainforests, a mere 7% of the dry land surface, are home to over half the animal and plant species on the planet.
Every year Man destroys 140,000 km² of rainforest, the equivalent of a football field per second. If this destructive pace continues, the rainforests will have virtually disappeared by 2050; we shall therefore lose half the planet's biological diversity.
|
|
The photosynthesis created by these forests provides a large part of the oxygen essential to life.
In addition, Man only cultivates 300 plant species throughout the world, whereas 75,000 wild species are edible. By allowing at least one plant species to become extinct every day on Earth, we are undoubtedly depriving ourselves of our future food resources.
|
|
| |
Click on the image to stop the panoramic show from rolling. To move backwards or forwards, hold down the left button and move to the left or right
|
|
| |
|
| |
|
|
home
