Annual flowers always look their best right before the first frost gets them.
Camera: Canon PowerShot A590 IS (hacked).
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Entrance Garden, Phipps Conservatory
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A Preview of the Fall Flower Show at Phipps
The Fall Flower Show officially opens this Saturday, but you can watch the installation as it progresses. More than half is already in place.
This year’s show has a Japanese theme, and it probably will not spoil your enjoyment of it to reveal that chrysanthemums will be involved.
Most of the chrysanthemums have not quite opened yet. The ones in the Serpentine Room are just beginning to show their faces.
The Sunken Garden is all dug up, and cartloads of new plants are rolling in.
Camera: Olympus E-20n.
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Center for Sustainable Landscapes, Phipps Conservatory
The Center for Sustainable Landscapes is housed in “one of earth’s greenest buildings.” It’s worth taking a tour to see the various clever ways the building makes use of renewable energy and resources.
Camera: Kodak EasyShare Z1485 IS.
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Phipps Hall of Botany
The Hall of Botany is a work of Rutan & Russell in an unusual baroque style.1
Cameras: above, Kodak EasyShare Z1485 IS; below, Olympus E-20n.
- In an earlier version of this article, we had attributed the Hall of Botany to Alden & Harlow, following online references. However, a newspaper article from December 17, 1900, just before the work began, tells us, “The architects of the building are Messrs. Rutan & Russell.” “Germ Idea of Henry Phipps School of Botany Belongs to Miss Annie M. Deens, Teacher of Biology,” Pittsburgh Daily Post, December 17, 1900, p. 5, where a rendering and plan of the building is printed. ↩︎
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Robert Burns by J. Massey Rhind
This is one of several Robert Burns statues that J. Massey Rhind made for various cities in the United States. Pittsburgh’s was sponsored by Andrew Carnegie and other prominent Pittsburghers of Scots ancestry.
Cameras: above, Konica-Minolta DiMAGE Z3; below, Olympus E-20n.
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Entrance to Phipps Conservatory
Above, looking up into the dome. Below, exterior and interior views of the lobby.
Cameras: above, Canon PowerShot A590 IS (hacked); below, Konica Minolta DiMAGE Z3.
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Outdoor Garden, Phipps Conservatory
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Tomatoes That Hate You
The Phipps Summer Flower Show this year was devoted to “weird and wonderful” plants. It closes tomorrow, though you’ll be able to see bits and pieces of it a while after that during the gradual transition to the Fall Flower Show.
Here are two members of the tomato family that want to kill you. Above, Malevolence (Solanum atropurpureum) from Brazil, absolutely stuffed with poisons and guarded by horrible thorns, but decorative in its own quirky way. Below, Porcupine Tomato (Solanum pyracanthos) from Madagascar, which is also prickly and toxic, but quite beautiful in flower.
Camera: Konica-Minolta DiMAGE Z3.
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Blackberry Lilies in the Phipps Outdoor Garden
Although they are grown more for their spotted orange flowers, Blackberry Lilies (Iris domestica) are almost as interesting for the decorative black seeds they produce. These were growing in the Outdoor Garden at Phipps Conservatory.
Camera: Konica-Minolta DiMAGE Z3.
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Ornamental Grass and Fountain in the Outdoor Garden at Phipps Conservatory
