Greenhouses of the Jardin des plantes de Nantes (Palmarium and Orangery)

Founded in 1687, the Jardin des plantes of Nantes received its first heated greenhouse in the mid-1840s: sources give 1843, 1844 or 1845, and one of them credits the city architect Henri-Théodore Driollet. By the end of the century these installations were decrepit. Appointed director in 1893, Paul Marmy judged that they could no longer grow exotic plants properly, and he finally secured funding, which his predecessors had requested in vain, for a large heated glasshouse, the Palmarium.

Ten firms were invited to compete, and the Établissements Guillot-Pelletier of Orléans won with the bid judged the most aesthetic and the cheapest. The contract was signed on 9 July 1895 and the house entered service on 15 March 1896, despite some faults in the glazing seals and the heating pipework. Marmy died on 21 December 1897 without seeing the orangery, aligned on the Palmarium's axis: it was put out to tender on 15 April 1899 and received on 26 January 1900. Two cultivation and exhibition houses date, according to the city, from the late 1890s.

The arid-climates house began as a rescue. The winter garden of a bourgeois villa on rue Paul-Bellamy, demolished in 1978, was dismantled and numbered; the death in 1979 of the cactus enthusiast André Camboulive, who left the city some three thousand plants, gave it a purpose. The complex was inaugurated on 23 February 1983. The Palmarium was restored in 1998, the cultivation and exhibition houses in 2010 and 2011, and a twin of the Palmarium, spotted in 2010 on an auction website, was installed in 2013 on the Île aux Palmiers.

The Palmarium follows the scheme of the great monumental glasshouses of its day: a central pavilion whose dome reaches 10 metres, framed by two symmetrical lateral wings. It came from the Guillot-Pelletier workshop, whose name appears on a door of the twin house found in 2010 and which ties that house to the same maker. The orangery, built in 1899-1900 by several trades (masonry, roofing and metalwork, carpentry, painting and glazing), has a rectilinear, somewhat austere design and stands about 8 metres high inside; it was conceived to shelter large potted specimens over winter.

The group follows an axial composition: the orangery sits in line with the Palmarium, which required an older glasshouse to be taken down and rebuilt further east, while a new house balanced the west side. The arid-climates house, set against the wall that separates the garden from rue Gambetta, combines three elements: in the centre, the recovered winter garden, whose metal frame was in excellent condition and was sandblasted and then zinc-sprayed (schooping); on either side, two wings added by the city, for a total of 300 m². Overall, the glasshouses cover about 800 m².

The Palmarium was first devoted to horticultural tropical species, including introductions from Gabon and from the Saint-Pierre garden in Martinique. Since then it has worked as a tropical-ecology laboratory, growing equatorial forest plants, epiphytes and lianas. The equatorial cultivation house, closed to the public, multiplies and studies epiphytes from Asia, Africa, Guyana and Guadeloupe; the tropical exhibition house shows tropical plants in a semi-natural setting.

The arid-climates house displays African and Madagascan plants in its centre and, in its wings, American cacti and succulents, many of them from the Camboulive donation. The Canary Islands house groups the flora of four island habitats, including laurel forest, with contributions from the botanic garden of Gran Canaria. A small greenhouse designed by François Delarozière, installed in 2013, holds a cabinet of curiosities and a satellite of carnivorous plants.

The glasshouses stand inside the Jardin des plantes, in central Nantes (rue Stanislas-Baudry); the garden holds the Jardin remarquable label. Allow about an hour for the accessible houses, longer with the open-air collections. The equatorial cultivation house stays closed to the public; access arrangements for the other houses are best checked with the city.

The visit pairs well with the Parc du Grand Blottereau, in another district, where greenhouses built in 1902 for a colonial trade school are devoted to useful tropical plants, from spices to fruit trees. Spring and summer bring the garden's open-air flowering, while the glasshouses remain a destination in any season.