Through the glass

A greenhouse is a portal to another place or time. Entering the Margaret C. Ferguson Greenhouses at Wellesley College last weekend, J and I traveled across space to the tropics and across time to an eventual spring. A greenhouse is a magic box that contains its own world, its own climate, and its own sense of time: a self-contained universe that remains separate and apart.

While many folks fly to warmer climes in the cold months, J and I typically don’t travel in the winter. We visit family in the summer, when my teaching load is lighter and the weather is more predictable: the only thing worse than weathering a New England winter is being stuck in an airport en route to Elsewhere. When you don’t travel during the winter, you become practiced in the art of hunkering down, cultivating your own inner fire while enjoying quick adventures close to home during the brief daylight hours: nothing that would keep you out in the cold for long, your own warm hearth being your final destination.

“Traveling a great deal in Concord” is how Thoreau described his own practice of home-centered excursion, his afternoon walks beginning and ending at the very writing desk where he’d record them in his journal. When you travel a great deal in your own neighborhood, your consciousness grows like a taproot, delving deep into the familiar and mundane. You become a connoisseur of the Here and Now, cultivating patience like a hidden bulb that will bear fruit only in due course, after many storms and much suffering.

Last weekend at the Wellesley College greenhouses, J and I repeatedly crossed paths with several photographers toting long-lensed cameras, tripods, and complicated flashes. “It’s like spring in here,” one of these photographers enthused as he followed us into a room filled with potted tulips, daffodils, and hyacinths. We later saw a van for a photography club on a field trip, and I can’t think of a better destination than a glass house that contains flora from around the world. A greenhouse, after all, is the opposite of snow globe. Instead of containing a tiny scene perpetually a-swirl in white, a greenhouse traps the sun’s own heat under glass, a sun-globe that refracts and magnifies all the color and warmth of an undying summer.

Click here for more photos from last weekend’s trip to the Margaret C. Ferguson Greenhouses at Wellesley College: enjoy!