Conservatory grows memories

Hey there, time traveller!
This article was published 02/04/2018 (2754 days ago), so information in it may no longer be current.

On the path, amongst the green, Hannon Bell stands and clasps the black-and-white photo to his chest.

Forty years have passed between the man in that photo, and the one here today. In those 40 years, Bell has changed: he’s gained a bit at the waist, and a whole lot more grey. But the place is almost exactly the same.

It was right around here, he says, or maybe a few feet to the west. Flashback to 1978, when Bell and his sister worked as fashion models for Eaton’s and The Bay.

For this photo shoot, they came to this warm, sun-lit place.

He holds out the photos, resplendent with 1970s fashion glory: dark moustache, slick-fitted suit. But there, in the background, is the same brick wall. The same brick wall and sprays of leaves that surround him here today.

The Assiniboine Park Conservatory has aged too, in the last 40 years. But mostly, it has not changed.

Since his modelling days, Bell has had many adventures. In addition to a long career as a real estate agent, he became a connoisseur of nostalgia: a classic car enthusiast, a renowned Elizabeth Taylor memorabilia collector.

Now, on the penultimate day of the conservatory’s public life, Bell finds that nostalgic instinct renewed.

“When I walked in here, I immediately was hit with summer,” he says as he gazes at the sea of green. “I know that time marches on, and you have to change. But it’s a shame when something is so iconic and around for so long.

“We’re just wondering if that new building will have the same (feeling). Well, probably in 20 or 30 years it will.”

And if Bell came here to remember, then everyone else did, too. The day before the conservatory was set to close forever, the place filled up with visitors, mingling in the smell of damp dirt and someone else’s Sunday perfume.

It is so busy, that the meandering paths are jammed up with people. So busy, that the lazy stroll typical of most conservatory visits is seized to a halting shuffle. So busy, that volunteers can’t remember it ever being busier.

All over the building, families came here to remember. Parents take photos of toddlers. Grandparents pose for pictures taken by adult grandchildren. Students settle into a crouch, snapping close-up photos of flowers.

On the edge of the path, sitting on a bench donated in memory of someone who passed, I think about flora.

There is so much of it here, splayed out in the sunlight, all of it clamouring to be seen. The bench where I sit is flanked by shoots of chestnut vine and philodendron gloriosum that reach into an indiscriminate tangle of green.

In front of me is a triangle palm, dypsis decaryi, the conservatory holds two. Its leaves fan up into a geometric display, an angular statement from which the tree gets its name; it is beautiful, unfamiliar and so very alive.

There are only about 1,000 of these trees left in the wild southern reach of Madagascar.

One of things that abetted the species’ decline is fire; the other is the fact that, it being pretty, its seeds were taken for international growers.

And there is no forest like this, in the wild. Not where plants from India rub leaves with trees from Peru or Japan, where bamboo casts gentle shadows on Jamaican pepper. We created places like this, to see the green world.

So, in that light, the conservatory became an intersection for all the ways we relate to growing things. Botanists offered workshops on palm trees or shrubs; couples came to get flower-spangled photos for their wedding day.

Or else, it was a refuge in winter, a place for families to escape from the cold. A place where, as a young child, I squeezed my dad’s hand and gazed up at the fronds hanging above; a place to learn about all the world holds.

Now, near the end of its life, the conservatory offers lessons of another kind.

“See that?” a man says to his daughter, and points to the struts near where brick wall meets glass ceiling. “That’s where the building is rusting from the water. That’s called corrosion.”

And it is age that will shutter the conservatory, starting Tuesday and hereafter. Age, time and the idea of something greater: the vision laid out for the park’s new addition, the Diversity Gardens, is spectacular, a $60-million dream.

Big dreams, these days, cost big money. There will be an admission fee for the new glass building, which is set to open in 2020. The conservatory was free, a place for everybody. So few things these days are a welcome to all.

Yet, all things must go and all things must change. So, on this day, a pause to acknowledge its passing.

A century ago, Winnipeggers made a space to breathe — in every season, but especially in winter.

A space to remember what it means to be enveloped by green, growing things. A space where life unfurled its wonders.

There it stood, tended by generations. The memories made in that space wove tendrils through time, leaving their imprint on modelling photos and memorial benches. The one I’m sitting on recalls a man named Peter Pellaers.

Underneath his name, an inscription: “There is no better place than a garden to sit and savour the moments.”

I hope we did enough of that, while the conservatory was with us. I hope we do it more, in the years without.

melissa.martin@freepress.mb.ca