Closed since 2020, when the exterior was reskinned, the Garden launched a successful $1.3 million fundraising effort to complete the vibrant, reimagined interior designed by renowned landscape architect Ron Lutsko, Lutsko Associates. This beautiful redesign fulfills our goals to create a larger pond, better visitor flow throughout the space and the ability to engage more with the plants. All within a 40 x 40-foot space.

This Garden jewel—the East Bay’s only tropical glass house open to the public—supports our commitment to education and plant conservation. Prior to closing it was a beloved destination for fifty years by visitors of all ages. The replanted interior will eventually have familiar displays of plants important in human uses such as chocolate and vanilla. Exciting new plantings include unusual tropical species of cycads, relocated from the Garden’s research greenhouses and on view to the public for the first time! Rounding out the display visitors will see flowering water plants such as Egyptian blue lotus (Nymphaea caerulea), in the enlarged pond. Like all the Garden’s collections, the plants in the tropical house are considered research plants and are available for study.

The Living Wall
The living wall is a stunning, two-sided display of plants that creates an opportunity to show the evolution of land plants. In support of this educational focus, Garden staff will continue to refine and update the plantings with a goal to replace the commonly cultivated materials with plants from the Garden’s collections. We hope to eventually incorporate everything from tropical mosses to plants from our tropical pitcher (Nepenthes) collection. The expanded and much-improved pond will house floating and submerged aquatic plants.

New Entrance Plaza
The redesign includes a shaded entrance plaza, providing a covered outdoor area for group tours or school groups.

Jade vine (Strongylodon macrobotrys), with its beautiful, dark, veined juvenile leaves, is one of a number of exciting climbing plants in the house. This liana will climb up the up the north side of the house, eventually revealing its mesmerizing jade-colored flowers, in long claw-like racemes. We can’t wait for it to flower for us!

The Gorgon plant or prickly waterlily (Euryale ferox) is the ugly cousin of Victoria, the giant water lily of the amazon, and named after one of the three gorgon sisters from mythology. Rightly so, since the plant is fascinatingly ugly, covered with spines, and with large ‘quilted’ floating leaves reaching almost a meter across. The plant is cultivated for its nutritious seeds in its native eastern and southeastern Asia. What’s fascinating about Euryale is that long distance dispersal of aquatic plants like this was thought to have been a result of continental drift and that long distance dispersal by birds was too ambitious over such distances. However molecular estimates of divergence times of Victoria (native of the Amazon) and Euryale (native to southeast Asia) were too recent to have been influenced by continental drift.   Long distance dispersal by birds should be considered a more viable explanation for these two disjunct but clearly related species.

An old favorite that survived the whole process of renovation, the travelers palm (Ravenala madagascariensis) is in the same family as our commonly seen bird-of-paradise plant, the Strelitziaceae. It is called the travelers palm because if you look at the base of the plant where old leaves have been cut you can see a channel in the leaf sheaths where water could be used by travelers. This majestic plant rises to the top of the house where we are hoping that under these improved tropical conditions it will soon flower and reveal its brilliant turquoise seeds.