Hills & Dales Estate Greenhouse

Hills & Dales grew up around gardens older than the house: pre-Civil War gardens started in 1832 by Nancy Ferrell and extended from 1841 by her daughter Sarah. Fuller E. Callaway bought the property in 1912, and the villa, designed by Neel Reid for the firm of Hentz, Reid & Adler, was finished in 1916. The Callaways then had a glass greenhouse built, with an attached head house, for Ida Callaway, who grew calla lilies among other plants.

After Ida died in 1936, her son Fuller Jr. and his wife Alice moved into the house. Thirteen years later, in 1949, they replaced the original glasshouse with the one that stands today, a Moninger greenhouse built on the footprint of its predecessor. The 2010 Portico article speaks of a replacement, while the official garden guide calls it a remodelling. A hailstorm damaged the building in the early 1980s, according to an interview with Alice recorded in 1994.

Alice Callaway died in 1998 and left the estate to the Fuller E. Callaway Foundation, which opened it to the public in October 2004. The greenhouse has since been kept much as it was in Alice's day. Her garden journal records, on 8 January 1937, the first calla lily of the season picked in the greenhouse, one of the earliest mentions of the crop there; Ida's tubers have been divided every year since her death.

The estate describes the structure as iron trusses and wood frames carrying glass panels, on a concrete foundation. It has three connected houses, each heated and cooled separately, with an attached head house that holds the boiler room. Roof vents open by hand or by thermostat, and the side vents by means of a large wheel-like crank. Shade comes from numerous removable aluminium slats hung beneath the glazing; the central house, the darkest, carries two layers of them.

Heat comes from the basement of the head house, where two boilers serve, one the greenhouse and the other the main house; first coal-fired, they now run on natural gas. In winter the thermostat stays at 58 °F, about 14 °C.

Each of the three houses has its own climate. The first, moderately shaded, holds begonias, orchids (Dendrobium, Cattleya, Phalaenopsis), ferns, jade trees and a sand bench for rooting cuttings. The central house, densely shaded, surrounds a fountain pool; it carries Alice's ferns, maidenhair among them, with clivias, anthuriums and variegated impatiens. The third, the brightest, hosts the calla lilies (Zantedeschia aethiopica), which bloom from December to May and are picked for LaGrange's First Baptist Church at Easter, along with jade trees, succulents and orchids, mostly Cattleya and Cymbidium.

Between 1974 and 1979 Alice recorded as many as 33 different maidenhair ferns, and the estate is working from her notes to bring several of these species back. The orchid collection, begun by Alice, has grown through two donations. The estate's bloom calendar also lists bougainvillea, jasmine, euphorbia and poinsettia in the course of the year.

The greenhouse stands west of the Callaway house, near the herb garden, and is stop number 10 on the official garden guide. From the visitor centre the walk to the house and gardens takes about ten minutes, and the estate advises allowing two hours for a visit. In cold weather the greenhouse doors may be shut, but they are not locked, according to the official text. The calla season, from winter into early spring, and the orchid blooms are the best moments. The nineteenth-century Ferrell gardens, the 1916 villa and the herb garden planted in 1960 are all within walking distance.