Along a meandering stretch of road in Winston-Salem, North Carolina, Katharine Reynolds finished her dream greenhouse in 1913, even before she built her home. The wife of tobacco magnate R. J. Reynolds designed a glass conservatory rising from ferns and peonies, overlooking rose and vegetable plots that eventually gave way to the couple’s thousand-acre country estate, called Reynolda. But over the past century, the glasshouse had started to lose its luster—and its original vision.
When Jon Roethling took over as the Reynolda Gardens director in 2018, he was surprised at the level of attention one of the South’s most iconic greenhouses needed. “I thought, Let me assess what I’ve got myself into,” he says. “This is not the kind of place where you can just slap a coat of paint on and call it a day. I realized that not only was it time for us to do standard updates like new window glazing, it might be time to do a hardcore refurbishment.”
Working with Jim Smith, a greenhouse consultant in Kentucky, Roethling learned that the New York Botanical Garden had kept the original blueprints. The fascinating book A World of Her Own Making: Katharine Smith Reynolds and the Landscape of Reynolda also helped fill in gaps. In her letters, Reynolds had written strict requirements that must have surprised Lord & Burnham, then the world’s premier greenhouse builders: that the foundation be made of humble local stone, that she employ her own North Carolina workers, and that the conservatory function as a public welcome center to the estate, with classes and displays of plants that local residents could learn to grow themselves.
“Here was a young Southern woman doing all this, acting as general contractor,” says Phil Archer, the deputy director of the adjacent Reynolda House Museum of American Art. “That was already unusual for the time. And instead of making a garden for family and friends, she also decided to make her formal gardens open right along a thoroughfare, so that people could easily look in and visit.”
A century later, Roethling had plenty to do, and a generous donation from local philanthropic couple Malcolm and Patricia Brown (who themselves walk the gardens regularly) made it possible, but not entirely easy: Rooms once intended for carnations and roses had since become unglamorous production houses. The east and west wings’ curved glass ceilings had been modified to straight panes. The centerpiece Palm House’s roof was partially blocked with unsightly algae and aluminum panels, with vents that had to be hand cranked to control light and temperature.
Reynolda hired the greenhouse restoration group Prospiant to make a top-to-bottom plan, which included repointing the original stone foundation and installing vents that automatically open and close to regulate airflow and temperature. An adjacent building, at different times a florist workshop and a garden club headquarters, underwent a total remodel, and new ramps now make the site entirely accessible. The whole space, just opened this fall, is a true entry point, dubbed the Brown Family Conservatory and Reynolda Welcome Center.
The staff has already started scheming about workshops, plant sales, and garden displays that will tie in to the house museum’s exhibitions. Roethling enjoyed the finishing touches the most, like populating the greenhouse: potted citrus in the orangery; tropical oddities; an orchid collection; silvery olive trees, bromeliads, and wavy fronds of all sorts in the soaring Palm House. And there, to crown it all, he hired craftsmen to custom design a clear ceiling with a tinted inner layer. Aluminum and rickety shades, begone. “We brought all that curved glass back,” he says of the two wings that flank the focal point. “When you stand in the Palm House now and look up, all you see is sky.”
