Travel

The Glass Houses of India: from Colonial Conservatories to New Glass Palaces

By the Verrière editors · Published on October 15, 2026

Lalbagh Glass House, Bangalore (Bengaluru), Karnataka
Lalbagh Glass House — Photo : Adil Jamal (CC BY-SA 4.0)

In India, the glass house is a genre of its own: inherited from 19th-century botanical gardens, it still hosts the great flower shows, in Bangalore as in Ooty, and several cities have built new ones since 2017. Here are all of them in the Verrière atlas.

The historic glass houses

The Lalbagh Glass House (1889–1891) in Bangalore and the Ooty botanical garden's glass house (1912) are the most famous: both are the setting for flower shows. In Howrah and Darjeeling, the great botanical gardens have their glasshouses too.

  1. Lalbagh Glass House

    🇮🇳 Bangalore (Bengaluru), Karnataka, India · 1889-1891

    Prince Albert Victor laid its foundation stone in 1889; today it stages Bangalore's great flower shows.

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  2. Glass House, Government Botanical Garden

    🇮🇳 Ooty (Udhagamandalam), Tamil Nadu, India · 1912

    Since 1848, Ooty's botanical gardens have grown flowers imported from an empire under glass, at 2,200 meters above sea level in the Nilgiris.

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  3. Large Palm House and Cactus House, AJC Bose Indian Botanic Garden

    🇮🇳 Shibpur, Howrah, West Bengal, India · Mid-19th century · Cactus House: 1987

    Beneath the iron dome grows a double coconut (Lodoicea maldivica), a Seychelles palm planted here in 1894.

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  4. Lloyd Botanical Garden Conservatory & Orchidarium

    🇮🇳 Darjeeling, India ·

    An orchidarium of 2,500 Himalayan orchids, in the highest botanical garden in West Bengal.

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The new glass houses

Since 2017, several cities have built their own glass palace: Kuppanna Park in Mysore, Davanagere, the cactus garden dome at Ekta Nagar (2020) and the Kalaignar Centenary Park glass house in Chennai (2024).

  1. Kuppanna Park Glass House (Nishad Bagh)

    🇮🇳 Mysuru (Mysore), Karnataka, India · 2017–2018

    Modelled on the Lalbagh Glass House, this round conservatory 36 metres across was completed in time for Mysuru's 2018 Dasara.

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  2. Davanagere Glass House

    🇮🇳 Davanagere, Karnataka, India · 2018

    Opened in 2018, this 108-by-68-metre conservatory has been billed by the Indian press as the largest glass house in the country.

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  3. Cactus Garden Dome, Ekta Nagar (Kevadia)

    🇮🇳 Ekta Nagar (Kevadia), Narmada district, Gujarat, India · 2020

    An octagonal 836 m² dome shelters exotic cacti and succulents at the heart of a 25-acre desert garden on the banks of the Narmada.

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  4. Glass House, Kalaignar Centenary Park

    🇮🇳 Chennai (Cathedral Road), Tamil Nadu, India · 2024

    A 16-metre air-conditioned glasshouse opened in 2024 on central Chennai land recovered by the state after a long legal battle.

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1157 botanical and historic greenhouses, across 76 countries, organized by continent in the complete catalogue.

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