Department
Greenhouses
A cold frame in February, a lean-to greenhouse on a south wall, heating with hot composting, the polytunnel as a household appliance.
The Glasshouse Floor as a Design Decision
Tristan Aoki compares concrete, gravel, brick, and bare earth as glasshouse floors, and finds that the question is older and more consequential than it appears.
The Dobby Stove in the Walled Garden
Eloise Vinter visits a 1924 cast-iron paraffin heater still in use at a Norfolk walled garden and considers what the old fuels can still do.
The Overwintered Fig in a Cool Glasshouse
Rowena Bell visits a 1908 Victorian glasshouse in Kent where the same Brown Turkey fig has fruited every year since 1949, and considers what the tree teaches.
Ventilating a Small Greenhouse Without Electricity
Octavia Bryne examines the wax-cylinder autovent, the manual roof crank, and the propped-door tradition, and weighs the case for each.
A Polytunnel as a Household Appliance
Tristan Aoki spends a year with a 24-by-12 polytunnel in suburban Kyoto and concludes it is less a garden structure than a kitchen extension.
Heating a Small Greenhouse with Hot Composting
Sage Marchetti tracks a winter in which a Hampshire grower kept his 80-square-foot greenhouse above freezing using nothing but a steel mesh cylinder of composting horse manure.
A Lean-to Greenhouse Against a South Wall in Wales
Rowena Bell visits a stone-walled lean-to in Ceredigion that has been in continuous use since 1962, and finds the bones of a working greenhouse and the gardener who keeps it.
A Cold Frame in February in Zone 5
Eloise Vinter spends six weeks at a sash-window cold frame on the north edge of Massachusetts, tracking interior temperatures, what germinates, and what waits.