The 196 greenhouses of North America

Its steel-and-glass roofs, designed by Ron Thom in 1974, have sheltered the world's largest indoor habitat for lowland gorillas since 2001.

Beneath high glass ceilings, the University of Georgia's botanical garden displays tropical plants of economic interest.

Rebuilt as a glass dome after fire reduced the original pavilion to ashes in 1902.

The dome, originally timber-framed, was rebuilt in steel and aluminium in 1949 and reglazed in a renovation completed in 2024.

A southern Appalachian forest growing beneath the glass pyramids of the River Journey building in Chattanooga.

The first large interior atrium garden in the United States: a terraced garden by Dan Kiley beneath a sawtooth glass ceiling, since 1967.

A conservatory under 50 feet of glass, replanted five times a year inside a Strip hotel-casino and visited free by some 20,000 people a day.

Vanderbilt's estate conservatory, completed in 1895 at the foot of the walled garden, has a forty-foot palm room and more than five hundred orchids.

Over 12,000 m² under glass holding rainforest, coral ocean, mangrove, savanna and desert, sealed for two years from 1991.

A Lord & Burnham conservatory of 1962, now a rarity, designed by the curator of the Montreal Botanical Garden.

A triodetic dome perched atop Vancouver, where more than 200 tropical birds fly free.

Its interlocking concrete arches form a petrified forest before visitors even step inside the tropical conservatory.

A 15-metre glass pyramid, opened in 1991, that is home to more than 750 tropical plants, birds and koi.

One of the largest lath structures in the world, built for the 1915 Panama-California Exposition and reopened in 2024 after a three-year restoration.

Designed by the county's chief of horticulture because there was no budget for an architect, it opened with the garden on 13 July 1969.

Completed in 1913 for Katharine Reynolds, this Lord & Burnham greenhouse became design No. 539 in the builder's catalogue.

An extremely rare Victorian tri-domed conservatory by Lord & Burnham, set in the heart of South Park.

Ten thousand square feet of glass and rainforest in the Sonoran Desert, where up to 4,000 butterflies from three continents fly at once.

Between 1,200 and 2,000 tropical butterflies, emerging on site from imported chrysalides, fly freely under this glass dome opened in 1988.

A free municipal glasshouse from 1970 combining palms, orchids, banana trees, cacti and seasonal flower shows.

The world's first geodesic dome to serve as a botanical greenhouse.

A 75-foot glass cone engineered to withstand Category 5 hurricane winds while sheltering some 1,500 free-flying butterflies.

More than 5,000 species of cacti and succulents, given by a collector from Minot, grow here on the Canada–US border.

Rebuilt plank by plank after the 1995 storm.

A 1930s conservatory, born with City Park's Art Deco WPA garden, crowned by a glass dome 40 feet high.

A 1935 Lord & Burnham greenhouse overlooking the rose garden, where a ponytail palm has reached about 30 feet in the rotunda.

Commissioned in 1924 by Lina Jane Hull, this Lord & Burnham glasshouse on an oil-boom estate reached its centenary freshly restored.

A former Art Nouveau market whose large windows were turned into a vast stained-glass work by Leopoldo Flores, housing a botanical garden.

A cylindrical glass tube spanning downtown Oklahoma City, between rainforest and desert.

A 70 m geodesic dome, billed as the world's largest glazed one, shelters three re-created deserts.

More than 2,200 cacti and succulents of 1,261 species and subspecies, sheltered at the heart of The Huntington's Desert Garden.

With little or no imported energy, two glass pavilions beside the Rio Grande recreate North American deserts and Mediterranean-climate coasts.

Opened in 1977, this one-hectare glass-enclosed park fills a whole city block on the top floor of a downtown Calgary shopping centre.

An 8,232-square-foot Belgian-built glasshouse where six epiphyte-laden plant chandeliers rise and fall above a Wollemi pine.

A pair of biomes under glass — rainforest and desert — at the heart of the Atlanta Botanical Garden.

The only freestanding Victorian fernery still standing in North America, with a schist grotto and waterfalls.

A low glass pyramid by architect Alden B. Dow, set in the gardens begun by his father, the founder of Dow Chemical.

Founded in 1867 on a 10,000-dollar gift and rebuilt in 1954 with one of the first all-metal-alloy conservatory frames.

A 1924 Lord & Burnham glasshouse, moved across the city in 1936 and faithfully rebuilt on its stone base in 2013.

A glasshouse shaped after quartz-crystal geometry, holding a Costa Rican cloud forest and Madagascar's spiny desert side by side.

Lord & Burnham greenhouses from 1898 still in service, producing more than 180,000 plants a year for a municipal park's beds.

Saved from demolition by a single philanthropic gift.

Ten themed greenhouses tell the botanical story of the planet under one continuous ribbon of glass.

More than 1,200 plants and 72 cactus varieties under glass, right in downtown Fort Wayne.

The only public botanical garden in the world with a signature permanent collection of Dale Chihuly glass.

The greenhouse built in 1897 for Henry Clay Frick's estate, designed by Alden & Harlow with the glasshouse builders Lord & Burnham.

Long used only to grow plants for the park, the Manito Park greenhouse opened to the public for Spokane's Expo '74.

Designed as a natural landscape, not a collection displayed in rows.

Rebuilt in 1954, this was the first conservatory in the United States to stand on an all-welded aluminium frame.

Nine acres of tropical gardens under glass roofs, with waterfalls and a quarter-mile indoor river, inside a convention hotel.

A 4.5-acre garden under a glass roof, with more than 500,000 plants, a 161,000-gallon lagoon and live alligators.

Four and a half acres of gardens, waterways and Texan façades under a steel-framed glass roof marked with a star, on the shore of Lake Grapevine.

A geodesic dome of 665 Plexiglas panels, opened in 1979 on a former brickyard, shelters more than 1,000 tropical species.

A municipal glasshouse with a glazed pyramid roof, planted with tropical foliage and succulents, in the middle of Brampton's large Chinguacousy Park.

On the estate Harry Fee gave to Michigan State University in 1945, three glasshouses of 1968 bring together tropics, desert and seasonal blooms.

With 65-foot ceilings, the Indianapolis Zoo's glass conservatory is being turned into an Amazon-style forest with sloths and macaws.

Marjorie Merriweather Post's orchid greenhouse still holds more than 2,000 specimens and supplies blooms for the rooms of her mansion.

The second-oldest public glass conservatory still standing in the United States.

Three display glasshouses (tropical, arid, temperate) in Alberta's largest botanic garden, west of Edmonton.

A hemispherical iron dome of 1959, set in a hollow of volcanic rock, housing a small Mexican humid tropical forest.

An Art Deco greenhouse of 1936 whose stepped, vertical glass walls were designed to stand up better to Midwestern hailstorms.

A tropical habitat under a glass dome where hundreds of butterflies of 50 to 60 species fly free, with birds and two flamingos.

An Art Deco cathedral of glass nestled in Eden Park, with its indoor tropical waterfall.

Taken down to its foundations in 2007, the 1911 conservatory was rebuilt as an exact replica, reusing its cypress gutters.

When it opened in 1995 it was billed as the largest tropical conservatory in Michigan.

The 2003 conservatory nearly doubled in size in 2026 and now includes a permanent butterfly house.

Its fiddle-leaf rubber tree, planted in 1891, still rises beneath the glass roof today.

The oldest continuously operating display greenhouse in the United States, devoted to camellias.

The great conservatory of Pierre S. du Pont's estate, built to dazzle his guests.

The largest construction project in Longwood Gardens' history, with a roof and walls that open according to the weather.

A 1901 Lord & Burnham complex whose Rose and Palm House, dismantled in the 1930s, is being rebuilt in 2026.

A largely underground glasshouse from which only the glazed peaks emerge, and the first completed building by the architect Emilio Ambasz.

One of the oldest surviving greenhouse complexes in the United States: a grape house of 1804, a camellia house of about 1820 and vines from Hampton Court.

Ten of the twelve houses making up the Lyman Conservatory are open to visitors; the other two are horticultural work spaces.

A Venezuelan rainforest hall under a roof of inflated ETFE cushions, described in 2008 as a first for a US zoo.

More than 4,000 butterflies of over 70 species fly year-round in a glass conservatory held at 78–80 °F in the Connecticut River valley.

Built in 1906 for the financier George W. Perkins, the glasshouse was rebuilt in 1969, keeping only its original portico.

One of the last great Victorian 'Crystal Palace' greenhouses still standing in the United States.

A conservatory drawn by Frank Lloyd Wright in 1904, demolished in the early 1960s and rebuilt on its original footprint.

A glass pyramid of about 6,000 sq ft housing a re-created tropical rain forest on the dry High Plains of Texas.

Designed by Alden B. Dow, this campus conservatory is believed to be the largest university-run display greenhouse in the United States.

Built to house the university's orchid collection, this glasshouse still grows some of the original orchids among its displays.

Opened in 2016 above the 1937 rose garden, it houses what the garden calls one of only 25 indoor tropical butterfly atriums in the country.

Three glass beehive domes, a modernist icon of Milwaukee, now under threat from age.

Four tropical pyramids planted in a winter that reaches -30°C.

More than 2,000 tropical butterflies fly freely beneath its glasshouse, replenished at a rate of 3,000 imported chrysalises each month.

Opened in 1946 a few minutes' walk from the Horseshoe Falls, it has staged a chrysanthemum show every autumn since then.

A park district's centennial gift to its city, this LEED Gold conservatory on the Rock River is the third-largest in Illinois.

An Edwardian-style glasshouse of 1929, saved from demolition in 1970 by residents who did not want to see it become a parking lot.

A free tropical conservatory with a pond and waterfall, inside the municipal greenhouse that grows the flowers for Oakville's parks.

The Virginia Area Historical Society calls it the only tropical botanical garden north of the Twin Cities; its display wing opened in 1933.

Steel catenary arches carry the glass roof of this 1999 orangery, designed as a cross between an 18th-century orangery and a modern conservatory.

An orchid and tropical-plant glasshouse in the oldest of Honolulu's five city botanical gardens, "reimagined" in 2025.

The first ornamental building on James B. Duke's estate, this 1899–1901 conservatory holds nearly 2,000 orchids of some 1,300 varieties.

An art deco glasshouse with stained-glass vaults and domes, targeted by an art pavilion project whose works a court suspended in 2022.

Beneath the living roof of Renzo Piano's museum, a 27-metre glass sphere holds a tropical rainforest rising through four levels.

Six of motor magnate Sam McLaughlin's eleven greenhouses survive, taken apart, repaired and reglazed in glass as first built.

An orchid house set inside a 100-metre cistern of the former Pemex refinery, crossed from end to end by suspended ramps.

A gift to the city from steel magnate Henry Phipps.

A 2,000-square-foot tropical conservatory under a glass roof 37 feet tall, open free on weekdays on an Illinois campus.

A glasshouse built in 1917 for a camellia collection from Guernsey, including six Camellia reticulata never before grown in the United States.

Three glasshouses given to South Bend, including a 1973 desert dome, beside a 1920s Lord & Burnham growing range.

At 43 metres high, it is recognised by Guinness World Records as the largest pyramid-shaped greenhouse.

On the Iowa State University campus, a tropical wing kept at 27 °C can hold up to 800 butterflies of 80 species.

A black plexiglass dome, rebuilt in 1977 after a fire, where lizards and birds roam free among orchids and bromeliads.

Six 30-foot royal palms from the Florida exhibit of the 1936-37 Great Lakes Exposition were replanted in its Palm House.

Opened in 2007, it is billed as the largest indoor garden open to the public in New England.

The Detroit Zoo's former Bird House, crowned by a glass dome, now holds a butterfly garden and a tropical free-flight aviary.

A glass rotunda 96 feet across, modelled on the estate's early lath house and built to teach botany with more than 700 tropical plants.

Its 1936 Garden Room is billed as the first public conservatory in the American Southwest; tropical butterflies now fly inside.

Opened in 2010 for tropical rhododendrons (vireyas), it describes itself as the first public conservatory built on the West Coast in recent history.

Two Lord & Burnham greenhouses of 1925-1926, restored and reopened in 2021, showing succulents from both hemispheres.

One of the few Lord & Burnham complexes left intact in the United States: twelve structures around a hollow square, with a domed palm house.

Its 8,000 sq ft butterfly conservatory is sheathed in 646 glass panels, each weighing about 200 pounds, set in five vaults.

Three octagonal glass pavilions and a 75-metre wing replaced Brooklyn Botanic Garden's ageing wooden greenhouses in 1988.

Rebuilt after the fire of 1896 with James Talcott's backing, this Victorian glasshouse has served botany teaching for more than a century.

Three glasshouses, tropical, semitropical and arid, hold over 1,000 taxa within the Regenstein Center in Glencoe.

Hydroponic greenhouses of transparent panels, including a geodesic dome, crossed by boat on the Living with the Land ride.

An ETFE greenhouse-sculpture whose unfurled roof draws on the spiral of a nautilus shell.

An 8,100 m² glass-and-granite dome where a simulated tropical storm rumbles several times a day.

At the foot of an office tower, three glass spheres hold more than 40,000 plants from the world's cloud forests.

Display greenhouse for orchids and bromeliads at Selby Gardens in Sarasota; a 32,605-square-foot conservatory is due to open on the campus in 2028.

Opened in 1993 beneath glass pyramids, this hall doubled at a stroke the number of species and animals on show at Denver Zoo.

An octagonal Lord & Burnham glasshouse that stood in Major's Hill Park, downtown Ottawa, before its move to the Experimental Farm in 1938.

Born from a plant collection brought back by a Pacific expedition.

An Amazonian forest planted under a pyramid whose 684 panes of glass were replaced in 2022 in an $8 million project.

A small Victorian Crystal Palace shipped "in kit form" in 1912, still standing on Capitol Hill.

Paid for by a 10,000-dollar gift, it is one of only three Victorian-style conservatories on the American West Coast.

The only known Victorian commercial greenhouse in New York City, facing the Gothic gateway of Green-Wood Cemetery.

A 1927 Lord & Burnham conservatory, closed in 2015 after glass panes fell and reopened in 2022 after a complete restoration.

An 80-foot seashell-shaped glass dome under which mangroves grow and birds fly free, in place since 1995.

The Elmhurst Park District's first capital project, added in 1923 to a greenhouse Seth Wadhams had built on his estate in the 1860s.

A glass greenhouse from 1994 connected to the Aven Nelson Building, where the University of Wyoming shows plants from 76 families free of charge in Laramie.

Sixteen living Washingtonia robusta palms stand under a 37 m glass vault in the middle of a Lower Manhattan office and retail complex.

A glass conservatory from 1904, one of the oldest buildings at the Toledo Zoo, turned in 2025 into two desert biomes full of lizards.