Bush Conservatory (Bush's Pasture Park)

Asahel Bush (1824-1913) reached Oregon in 1850, published the Oregon Statesman from 1851, moving it to Salem in 1853, and later founded the Ladd and Bush bank with William S. Ladd. In 1860 he bought about a hundred acres on the town's southern edge, where his Italianate house, whose design is credited to Wilbur F. Boothby, went up in 1877-78. In 1882 he added a glasshouse against its east side for his daughters Sally and Eugenia. Sally cut flowers there for arrangements on her own table and at her father's bank, raised vegetable starts and grew mushrooms under the benches.

In 1930 according to the Oregon Encyclopedia, or in the early 1930s according to the Mission Street Parks Conservancy, the family replaced the superstructure with a kit greenhouse from the Moninger company. The City of Salem, given 57 acres in 1917, inherited the rest of the estate in 1953 on the death of the last Bush child, and added a cold frame around 1960.

In 1977-78 local residents organised to stop the conservatory being demolished: volunteers repaired the superstructure and replaced the broken glass and every wooden bench. The volunteer gardeners then recruited by the Salem Art Association became the Bush Conservatory Gardeners (in 1979, according to the Salem Reporter), renamed Friends of Bush Gardens in 1991 and succeeded by the Mission Street Parks Conservancy in 2018. A 220,000-dollar campaign launched in 2008 with Salem City Parks paid for the full restoration of 2010-11. Sources variously call it the oldest in Oregon, the oldest in the Pacific Northwest, or the second oldest in the West after the conservatory in San Francisco's Golden Gate Park.

The conservatory is attached to the east side of Bush House, the timber-sided Italianate house that became a museum in 1953. In its 1882 form, glazing rose from a single-wythe brick wall and a wood stove provided the heat.

The frame seen today dates from the alterations of the 1930s. A Moninger 'Iron Frame and Truss House', a greenhouse sold as a kit with an iron frame and iron trusses, was then erected on the original brick walls; the Oregon Encyclopedia notes that this made the building eight inches, about 20 cm, longer. A boiler room was built to the north-east, and the stove gave way to an oil-fired burner that circulated hot water through newly installed registers.

The 2010-11 restoration replaced iron members and timber beams, renewed the walls and foundations and fitted a new boiler, with care taken to keep the structure's integrity. Upkeep still follows old routines: in April 2020 the glass was whitewashed to shield delicate plants from the sun. None of the sources consulted gives the conservatory's dimensions; interpretive panels inside tell the story of its construction.

This is not a scientific collection. The Mission Street Parks Conservancy, working with Salem Parks, keeps a group of plants that were common in Victorian conservatories; the sources consulted do not publish a list, though one travel guide mentions cacti and other exotic plants. The wooden benches, all replaced in 1977-78, were repaired while the conservatory was closed during the 2020 pandemic, and volunteers kept tending the plants every week.

Outside, the Conservatory Garden wraps the building in mixed borders. To the north, Sally Bush's former raised beds have become a tight network of paths around espaliered apple trees and blueberries, planted for the pruning classes the city ran in the 1960s. To the south lies a shady border at its best in spring. In a small hedged bed along the Bush House driveway, a hot-coloured border funded by the Hardy Plant Society of Oregon draws hummingbirds, bumblebees and butterflies in July to its Monarda, Agastache, Kniphofia and Helenium.

The conservatory stands in Bush's Pasture Park, a 90.5-acre (36.6 ha) city park just south of downtown Salem, east of Bush House and close to the car park at the end of Bush Street SE; admission is free. A visit to the glasshouse itself is short and pairs well with the house museum, which keeps its original wallpapers and furnishings, the Bush Barn Art Center and the Municipal Rose Garden, planted from 1955, whose Tartar Old Rose Collection, laid out by Elizabeth Lord and Edith Schryver, holds more than 100 species and cultivars of old roses. From early March to June the Rhododendron Hillside, with about 130 varieties, is at its peak; the roses take over in summer.