McMillan Greenhouse (UNC Charlotte Botanical Gardens)

The University of North Carolina at Charlotte Botanical Gardens were begun in 1966 on what was then a newly established campus of the state university system. They were the idea of biology professor Herbert Hechenbleikner and of Bonnie E. Cone, founder of UNC Charlotte, whose forerunner, the Charlotte Center of the University of North Carolina, had opened in 1946. The first part to be laid out was the wooded Van Landingham Glen, started that same year.

The McMillan Greenhouse was built with an equally specific purpose: to give the gardens a home for an orchid collection. That collection still thrives there and includes some of the original plants. None of the sources consulted gives the year the greenhouse was built or identifies the person or family it is named after.

Over more than four decades the gardens have grown to some ten acres of outdoor plantings, together with the glasshouse, its attached workspace and a teaching classroom. The most recent addition is the Mellichamp Terrace. Bonnie Cone herself is buried in the gardens.

The gardens describe the McMillan Greenhouse as a 4,500 sq ft glasshouse, about 420 m², with an attached workspace; the Wikipedia article gives 4,000 sq ft. The building also contains a teaching classroom housing a botanical and horticultural library of more than 1,200 books, along with the visitor sign-in area, and it is wheelchair accessible.

Inside, the space is divided into areas with distinct climates. Wikipedia counts five environments, ranging from the deserts of the Americas and Africa to the tropical regions of the Old and New Worlds. The gardens' own site lists an orchid room, a desert room, a tropical room, a carnivorous and bog plant area, a dinosaur garden and a collection of economic plants. In the tropical room a banana plant grows right up to the greenhouse ceiling. None of the sources consulted names the architect or describes the glazed structure itself.

According to the gardens, the orchid room holds the largest collection of orchids in Charlotte; Wikipedia notes Cymbidium and Dendrobium among them, alongside bromeliads and ferns. The desert room brings together the greatest variety of succulents of any botanical garden in the region.

The gardens describe themselves as the only ones in the Charlotte area to show carnivorous and bog plants, including pitcher plants (Sarracenia), sundews and Venus flytraps native to the south-eastern United States. The dinosaur garden evokes a prehistoric world of ferns and living fossils around a Deinonychus skeleton sculpture. The economic plant collection features a miniature orange tree, a chocolate tree, an allspice tree, a pineapple plant and a vanilla vine, while the tropical room is home to a Titan Arum.

The greenhouse stands on the UNC Charlotte campus, in the botanical gardens that also hold Bonnie Cone's grave, near Cato Hall and Fretwell Hall. The gardens present it as worth visiting in every season; an hour is enough to see all its rooms.

A visit naturally continues into the outdoor gardens: the Van Landingham Glen, with its collection of some 3,500 rhododendrons and azaleas, and the Susie Harwood Garden with its dwarf conifers and Japanese maples. The orchid conservatory of the Daniel Stowe Conservancy in Belmont, also featured in this atlas, lies about 35 km to the west.