Great Glasshouse

Opened in 2000 within the brand-new National Botanic Garden of Wales, the first major botanic garden created in the United Kingdom in nearly two centuries, the Great Glasshouse is the work of Foster and Partners, awarded a gold medal at the National Eisteddfod of Wales the same year. Its elliptical shape, often likened to a raindrop resting on the Welsh hillside, houses the largest single-span glasshouse in the world: 95 meters long by 55 wide, for about 3,500 m² of floor area. The interior landscape, designed by landscape architect Kathryn Gustafson, recreates rocky terraces, sandstone cliffs, and scree slopes to host threatened plants from six Mediterranean-climate regions: California, southwestern Australia, Chile, South Africa, the Canary Islands, and the Mediterranean basin itself. Though these six regions cover only 2% of the Earth's land surface, they hold more than 20% of all known flowering-plant species. The Great Glasshouse has become the architectural emblem of the Welsh garden.