The palm house was the Victorian temple of exotic plants – glass cathedrals built to grow the tropics in the English cold
The Palm House holds twenty-three hundred and two reviews and a 4.6 – a strong score on a large sample – and it is named after one of the most beautiful and characteristic inventions of the Victorian age: the great glass palm house, the crystal cathedral built to grow the tropics in the cold of England.
The temple of exotic plants
A palm house is a large glasshouse, a conservatory built specifically to house palms and other tropical and exotic plants – to recreate, under glass, the warm, humid climate of the tropics in the middle of temperate England. The most famous is the great Palm House at Kew Gardens, a soaring structure of glass and iron completed in the 1840s, one of the most beautiful glasshouses in the world.
These structures were marvels of Victorian engineering and ambition. Using the new technologies of cast iron and large-scale glass manufacture – the same technologies that produced the Crystal Palace, which we have met throughout this survey – the Victorians built vast, light, elegant glass houses that could maintain a tropical climate through the English winter, allowing them to grow and display plants from every corner of their expanding empire.
The plants of empire
The palm house was, in a real sense, a monument to empire and exploration. As British ships and explorers ranged across the globe, they brought back plants – exotic, valuable, scientifically fascinating – from the tropics and beyond. The palm houses and botanical gardens were where these treasures were grown, studied and displayed: living collections of the botanical wealth of a global empire.
This had a serious scientific and economic purpose. Botanical gardens like Kew were centres of research and of the transfer of valuable plants around the empire – rubber, tea, quinine and other economically crucial crops were studied and propagated in these glasshouses, with enormous consequences, for good and ill, for the global economy and for the countries whose plants were taken. The beautiful glass palm house was the elegant public face of a serious and sometimes ruthless botanical enterprise.
The palm, symbol of the exotic
The palm tree itself is one of the great symbols of the warm, the tropical, the exotic and the luxurious. To a cold northern people, the palm evokes sunshine, holidays, distant shores, ease and abundance. A “palm house” promises a warm, green, exotic escape from the grey English weather – a little pocket of the tropics under glass. And a bar or venue named the Palm House is selling exactly this: warmth, greenery, light, a sense of the lush and the exotic, a botanical escape.
The palm has other resonances too – the palms strewn before Christ on Palm Sunday, the palm of victory in the classical world, the desert oasis with its life-giving palms. It is a plant rich in meaning across many cultures, almost always positive: life, victory, peace, abundance, the promise of warmth.
The venue
A well-regarded venue doing a strong 4.6 across a large and real sample, trading on exactly the associations its name evokes – the light-filled, green, warm, glass-house escape, the little pocket of the exotic tropics under a northern sky.
Verdict
Well-rated and beautifully named after the Victorian glass cathedrals built to grow the tropics in the English cold.
Settle in among the green and the light, and raise a glass to the great palm houses of the Victorian age – the crystal temples where an empire grew the world’s plants under one roof.
Alan Nafzger was born in Lubbock, Texas, the son Swiss immigrants. He grew up on a dairy in Windthorst, north central Texas. He earned degrees from Midwestern State University (B.A. 1985) and Texas State University (M.A. 1987). University College Dublin (Ph.D. 1991). Dr. Nafzger has entertained and educated young people in Texas colleges for 37 years. Nafzger is best known for his dark novels and experimental screenwriting. His best know scripts to date are Lenin’s Body, produced in Russia by A-Media and Sea and Sky produced in The Philippines in the Tagalog language. In 1986, Nafzger wrote the iconic feminist western novel, Gina of Quitaque. He currently lives in Holloway, North London. Contact: [email protected]
Energy of someone paying attention to things.