A Tropical Pavilion in a Northern Winter: Olbrich's November
Olbrich Botanical Gardens holds sixteen acres of Wisconsin gardens — and the only Thai pavilion in the continental United States, with a glasshouse of the tropics beside it. November is when the Bolz Conservatory earns its keep.
On Madison's east side, on the shore of Starkweather Creek near Lake Monona, Olbrich Botanical Gardens runs the city's most elegant argument with its climate. Outdoors: sixteen acres of gardens in the Wisconsin manner — rose, herb, perennial and rock gardens arranged around a sunken garden and reflecting pools, now in their November dormancy of seed heads and structure. Indoors and across the creek: a gilded Thai pavilion in a garden of its own, and the Bolz Conservatory's glass pyramid of the tropics, where November's visitors walk out of the Wisconsin cold into orchids and birdsong.
The Thai Pavilion is a singular artifact: a gift from the Thai chapter of the Wisconsin Alumni Association and the government of Thailand, built by Thai artisans in 2001 — the only Thai pavilion in the continental United States, and one of only a handful outside Thailand. Its Sala, ornately carved and gold-leafed, stands in a garden planted to evoke a Thai landscape with Wisconsin-hardy plants — a collaboration between climates that should not work and demonstrably does, through all but the hardest winters, when its guardians wrap and tend it like the treasure it is.
The conservatory is the winter city's greenhouse heart: palms, orchids, a waterfall and free-flying birds in a climate maintained at the tropics' specifications, with the holiday season bringing its model train and flower shows. For Madison families, the Bolz in January is a standing prescription; November is when the prescription is first filled each year.
Olbrich is a city institution — a public garden run by the city with its foundation partners — and its calendar of classes, concerts and exhibitions makes it one of the near-east side's cultural anchors. Its gardens are free; the conservatory's admission is modest, with free hours weekly — the democratic arrangement a public garden owes its public.
Our outdoors desk will keep Olbrich in the seasonal rotation: the gardens' turns, the pavilion's care, the conservatory's shows. In a city that spends five months negotiating with winter, the existence of a tropical pavilion and a Thai sala by a frozen creek is not an eccentricity. It is a strategy, and a lovely one.
