Display Greenhouse, Kingwood Center Gardens

Charles Kelley King, who joined Ohio Brass in 1893 as the company's first electrical engineer, bought the 47-acre (about 19 ha) Kingwood property in Mansfield in 1912. The estate already had a craftsman-style house, a barn, a chicken coop, a tea house, a fountain, a pond and a greenhouse. Construction of Kingwood Hall began in 1926. According to the centre, King seemed particularly fond of greenhouses: he had some before 1926, and a new greenhouse built as part of the service building compound of the new estate replaced them. It produced vegetable transplants, cut flowers and plants for use around the property. Two logbooks from 1934 and 1935, rare artefacts kept by the centre, show heavy use: they mention "show" pigeons, which presumably lived in the dovecote associated with the greenhouse, and a mailing list of people who had cut flowers posted to them.

King died in 1952 and the estate opened as a public garden in October 1953. For about a decade his 1,500-square-foot greenhouse remained the garden's only one. In the mid-1960s it was enlarged to about 7,000 square feet (about 650 m²), and another 650 square feet were added years later. The expansion made possible cold-weather floral shows, which ran from the 1960s for about thirty years with forced bulbs as the main feature, while also supporting production for the outdoor beds. Two poly tunnels, a cold frame and, today, a sales greenhouse in the Garden Gateway, the visitor centre opened with the 2020 improvements, add further growing space.

The centre describes the Display Greenhouse as a set of individual houses devoted to tropical plants, succulents, bromeliads and seasonal arrangements, alongside production houses where thousands of annuals are raised every year. The photograph published by the centre shows an interior under a roof of clear panes carried on white rafters, with a glazed side wall as well. Aerial imagery shows, in the northern part of the estate, a glass-roofed range attached to a large U-shaped service building.

Floor areas: about 1,500 square feet (≈ 140 m²) originally, about 7,000 (≈ 650 m²) after the mid-1960s enlargement, then about 650 more. The page for the orchid exhibition distinguishes an Orangery, whose "historic arches and windows" frame the displays, from a Tropical House, without saying how these spaces relate to the display greenhouse. Wikipedia, for its part, lists a Cacti and Succulent House and a Tropical House.

The centre sums up the greenhouse's contents in a few categories: tropical plants, succulents, bromeliads and seasonal arrangements. The Mansfield tourism office describes it as densely packed with tropical and desert plants, including a fruit-bearing banana tree, and mentions carnivorous plants, among them Venus fly traps and pitcher plants. Wikipedia lists Acalypha hispida (chenille plant) in the Tropical House, and photographs from December 2005 on Wikimedia Commons show Echeveria hybrids grown in the greenhouse.

Growing takes up much of the work: thousands of annuals, mostly raised from seed, are produced each year for the outdoor beds, and tropical or frost-tender plants overwinter there before returning in the summer displays. In winter the Winter's Interlude exhibition fills it with more than 500 orchids, along with air plants and tropical plants, and ends with a wall of more than 250 Phalaenopsis in the Tropical House, part of them donated by Green Circle Growers of Oberlin, Ohio.

The greenhouse stands within the grounds of Kingwood Center Gardens in Mansfield, which visitors enter through the Garden Gateway visitor centre after buying a ticket. It combines naturally with the rest of the estate: the Allée cut through the woods in 1926, the perennial garden, Mr. King's formal gardens and Kingwood Hall, the house begun the same year.

The tourism office calls it full of variety all year round. The high point comes in winter: the orchid exhibition, included in garden admission, runs from late January to early March in the edition announced on the website, and a one-day orchid sale follows its close. The greenhouse's own hours differ from those of the exhibition, so the official site has the current times.