Just around the corner from Como Zoo’s polar bears, snow leopards, and other winter-loving creatures is a Victorian-era tropical oasis. The Marjorie McNeely Conservatory in Como Park floats on the horizon like a series of great, sparkling glass beads. Up close, the building’s steel and aluminum frame and solid Ionic columns are less ethereal, but the dominating impression is of glass and light.
Call it a reverse snow globe. Outside: a winter tableau—snow falling on the rolling park’s pine, elm, and willow trees, and people wrapped in bulky coats. Inside: thousands of extraordinary palms, plants, ferns, and orchids in four different gardens; pools and fountains; and visitors disrobing, coats on their arms.
The Palm Dome is the hottest and most fragrant room in the complex, dripping in jasmine-infused humidity year-round. Each plant is carefully identified. The stubby King Sago, Cycadaceae cycas revoluta, with its coarse, woody trunk and elaborate crown of elongated green fronds, looks disarmingly like a palm. The edifying sign at its base, however, identifies it as a cycad, a living fossil that covered the earth 150 million years ago, whose closest living relatives are the pine and the spruce.
Near King Sago is the soaring fifty-foot Chinese fan palm with broad leaves and a trunk that looks like rough husks bound together. Next to that stands a thin cousin—the hurricane palm—equally tall, but with a smooth, narrow trunk and oval-shaped fronds.
The conservatory opened on November 7, 1915, under Park Superintendent Frederick Nussbaumer’s direction. As a young man, Nussbaumer had worked at London’s Royal Botanic Gardens, where ornate glasshouses like the Palm House were popular. He was hired by the city of St. Paul as a gardener around 1887 and became superintendent in 1892.
In the Sunken Garden, a balcony overlooks a long, rectangular pool full of water lilies and thick, piebald goldfish, which leads to a bronze maiden. Dozens of red, pink, and apricot-colored poinsettias—eight different varieties—are on display in the winter, ringed by blue Italian cypresses, to spectacular effect.
Most visitors enter and leave the conservatory by way of the new Fern Room, which opened in 2005. The addition’s boxy shape is at odds with the curving original, but the interior is serene. Beside a waterfall, there are wishing ponds and ferns unfurling in every imaginable way: wooly tree ferns, rasp ferns, and racks of staghorns sprout from the walls.
St. Paul, Nussbaumer believed, must always have a “recreation ground for all classes of people.” And this is it. Their voices rise above the star fruit and common fig in the North Garden. They photograph their children in the Sunken Garden. They take refuge from the cold and the wet, whale-gray winter sky, and exclaim with delight at the sight of a spider-like brown and yellow orchid descending from its stem.—Julie Hessler
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