Hillwood Greenhouse (Hillwood Estate, Museum & Gardens)

Hillwood's Georgian Revival house was built in the 1920s by Daisy Peck Blodgett for her daughter, Helen Blodgett Erwin, on a 25-acre property first laid out by the landscape architect Willard Gebhart. Marjorie Merriweather Post bought it in 1955; the architect Alexander McIlvaine rebuilt the interior, a campaign completed in 1956, while the landscape architects Umberto Innocenti and Richard Webel expanded the existing gardens.

A small greenhouse already stood on the grounds. Orchids were Post's favourite flower and she spent significant resources on them, seeing Hillwood as the ideal home for her growing collection: she had four more greenhouses built on either side of the existing one and hired an orchid curator to tend the plants and breed new varieties for her. The curator brought orchids in bloom to the house, where they were always shown in Post's bedroom, the breakfast room, the library and the French drawing room; cut orchids also went into the arrangements for her receptions, and selections were shipped to her other residences when she was staying there.

Hillwood opened as a museum in 1977. According to Wikipedia, the greenhouse was rebuilt in 1996 and looks as it did in Post's lifetime. The museum maintains the collection to the standards she set and still fills the mansion with plants grown on site.

Rather than a single show pavilion, the Hillwood greenhouse is a working range. The museum's own account says that Post added four greenhouses flanking the small one she found in 1955; what stands today is the 1996 reconstruction, intended to reproduce the range as it looked in her time. The sources consulted give neither an architect nor dimensions, for the original or for the rebuilt structure.

The interior combines display and production. Besides the houses where the orchids and tropical plants live, the building holds offices and work spaces for the horticulture staff, and it is used to grow flowers for arrangements when the cutting garden is not in bloom. Visitors can walk in while staff members and volunteers are at work. A separate conservatory inside the Ellen MacNeille Charles Visitor Center serves as the meeting point for greenhouse tours. The greenhouse belongs to a 25-acre estate next to Rock Creek Park, where thirteen acres of formal gardens surround the mansion.

The collection centres on orchids, Post's favourite flower: Hillwood keeps more than 2,000 specimens of orchids and tropical plants, in hundreds of varieties, cared for to the founder's exacting standards. Plants in bloom are still carried into the mansion, continuing the custom of rooms dressed with orchids, and the greenhouse also produces cut flowers for arrangements throughout the house.

The orchids bring colour to the greenhouse even in winter. The museum's programme includes twenty-minute tours led by its orchid specialists, an Orchid Month, and repotting and floral design workshops built around these plants, which the staff grow using current research and techniques.

The greenhouse stands on the Hillwood estate at 4155 Linnean Avenue in north-west Washington, a short walk from the mansion. It can be entered whenever the gardens are open; the twenty-minute tours with an orchid specialist are limited to ten people, with tickets handed out at the visitor center when the estate opens each day.

Allow time for the rest of the 25-acre grounds, including the Japanese-style garden, the French parterre, the rose garden, the Dacha and the Adirondack Building, as well as the mansion and its collections. Winter is a rewarding season, when the orchids provide the colour under glass.