Deep winter might seem like a bad time to start a series about plants. It’s true that all the plants outside are dead or in retreat, and the world is bleak and grey. But what if I told you there is another world, where the plants never die, where seasons never change, where mankind is the master of plants in view.

Well, if I told you that I would be lying, or at least exaggerating. However, there is a place where all of this is attempted, where lush cornstalks and obscure succulents mingle in unseasonable warmth and humidity—the Washington University greenhouse, the Jeanette Goldfarb Plant Growth Facility. Situated behind the Life Sciences Building, this 10,000 square foot facility began operating in 1987, replacing an older greenhouse located in what is now the parking lot behind the current one. I had an opportunity this week to tour the greenhouse, to see their specimens and experiments and to find out how they maintain their leafy domain.

Curran Neenan | Student Life

Fields of white clover lay in the Wash. U. greenhouse. They are often used in botanical population studies. The tall bush in the background is Ehretia cymose, the medicinal plant brought from Ghana.

The sensation as I entered evoked the blanket of humidity I feel leaving Orlando airport when visiting home—a welcome feeling when the weather outside is in the single digits. The greenery, too, sits in stark contrast to the wintery hell of dead trees and snow-smothered plants outside.

The greenhouse facilities are primarily dedicated to growing and maintaining research plants. They have forests of corn taller than I am, and rooms filled with wild clovers and sorghum. These plants are used not only in botanical research, but also cross over into anthropology and history.

Curran Neenan | Student Life

A coniferous sapling is flanked by Spanish Ivy and another “Air Plant.” These plants do not have roots and absorb their water from the atmosphere. Above the sapling is some of the tech that keeps the greenhouse functioning.

One plant being studied, little barley (Hordeum pusillum), is a “lost crop”—once cultivated by indigenous peoples in North America, it now only exists as a perennial weed. Studying little barley sheds light on the process and practice of domestication in the past, marrying archaeology and genomic science.

Some of the most impressive plants are part of the Wash. U. greenhouse collection, often brought back from professors in the field. They have huge 30-year-old jade plants and a veritable forest of cacti and succulents, some of which are still unidentified. “Some of these have been here for so long that we don’t know where they came from” explained greenhouse assistant Hammy Sorkin; “a lot of succulents have hybrids that aren’t even restricted to the same genus.” Despite their ability to control climatic conditions and the growth of hundreds of plants, some mysteries remain inscrutable.

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Through a magnifying glass, one can see the detail of a flowering succulent, critical to the identification of succulent species.

They have a makeshift swamp with carnivorous Equisetum and Venus flytraps (as an aside, now I know from personal experience that having a plant wrap its lips around your finger is a deeply disconcerting feeling). A coffee bush in one room is producing berries. The prize of the collection is a Ponytail Palm, which some readers might be more familiar with as a small desk plant, that reaches the ceiling. The palm was the first plant brought into the new greenhouse facilities in 1987 and almost died near the beginning. Now, in the words of greenhouse supervisor Mike Dyer, “If it ever leaves here, it will have to be pulled out by a helicopter.”

Other specimen plants have particular benefits for humans—take for instance the Ehretia cymose, a medicinal plant from Ghana brought to Wash. U. by professor Memory Elvin-Lewis. A poultice made from this wild-looking tropical tree can be applied topically to stimulate bone healing.

Yet not is all peachy keen in the greenhouse, for enemies lurking in the shadows. Corn smut fungus, thrips, aphids, flies and other pests stand ready to devour and destroy plants, and left unchecked they could decimate this closed ecosystem.

That is the keyword, ecosystem; you cannot think of these plants as discreet organisms, but rather to succeed in maintaining them you must become mother nature in absentia, using biological factors to solve biological problems. You have to work with the plants, and their predators, and their predator’s predators. Growing plants is not just about the plants, it’s about their environment, insects and fungi, humidity, light, temperature, dirt and a million other factors. A greenhouse is not just a room with plants in it, it is a parallel world, an alternative manmade ecosystem.

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Corn Smut, a common fungal pest. Indegenous peoples of Central America would cook and eat it. They knew it as huitlacoche.

So how does that work with respect to the aphids, the most pernicious of greenhouse pests, so merciless as to suck all of the sap from plants until death? For one, they set up cotton plants as decoy targets. The bugs find the cotton plants more appealing than others and attack them first. This decoy buys time for the heavy artillery units to come in: Parasitic wasps, Aphidius. Wasps are some of the evilest creatures on earth, so brutal in their methods that they made Charles Darwin question his belief in a benevolent god. They are perfect greenhouse mercenaries. The Aphidius are released into the greenhouse, and target the Aphids immediately, laying their eggs directly into the Aphids’ bodies. The young wasps then develop inside of the living bodies of the Aphids, in what must be an incredibly painful process, perhaps a fitting punishment for the crime of trying to eat all of Wash. U.’s clovers. They eventually die and become dry desiccated husks of their former bodies. These aphid shells are known to greenhouse growers as “Aphid Mummies.”

Gross right? Well if you don’t like bugs, we have technology. Grow rooms, the hyperbolic time chambers of gardening. Above the greenhouse, these sealed metal boxes stimulate plant growth in the most highly controlled conditions. Less natural, but incredibly effective. “We grow Arabidopsis here,” said Mike Dyer. “It’s a green rat”––the botanical equivalent of laboratory mice. He went on to explain the spectrum of interest in greenhouse work; “some people are into all the tech… giant new shiny boxes.”

Curran Neenan | Student Life

Housed above the greenhouse, arabidopsis, the green lab rat, grows in one of the “growth chambers.”

The technologies and processes we have developed to grow plants are manifold, and at Wash. U. we use them all to the fullest. Life perseveres, whether it be in a metal box, a lush greenhouse or even the snowy wilderness of winter, from which spring will soon emerge.