From the lakeside lawn, take the stone staircase to the lower garden level.
Tom Plant’s retirement estate, Lucknow, embodied a unique blend of opposing values – embracing the contrasts of tradition and ingenuity, as well as nature and technology.
For Olive Plant, a favored pastime was superintending her greenhouse and the perennial gardens that dominated the slope below the mansion’s lakeside lawn. The greenhouse – like the mansion – was designed to blend the worlds of nature and technology.
The heated, glass and steel greenhouse spanned 100 feet, wrapping around the curved retaining wall at the property’s south-facing lakeside terrace. The greenhouse was designed and built by the Lord and Burnham Company of New York and the original construction plans (dated 1914) are held in the archives at the New York Botanical Garden – one of the many public conservatories built by the company.
Lord and Burnham was well known for the style and quality of their product. Their advertisements in periodicals such as Country Life allude to the idea that no wealthy estate was complete without a greenhouse – and your peers would notice if you hadn’t one. Perhaps this is why the Plants opted to have their greenhouse “Lord & Burnham built.”
All that remains of the greenhouse today is the lower foundation wall, large pipes curving along the exterior walls, which carried hot water for the heating system, and a drainage line running along the center of the building’s footprint. The greenhouse was demolished completely in the late 1950s, shortly before the property opened to the public as Castle in the Clouds. Before that, it had survived the Great New England Hurricane of 1938, which was one of the most destructive tropical cyclones to strike the region, as well as an unfortunate incident in the early 1950s, in which a deer fell through the roof of the building from the terrace lawn.
