Under Glass

THE GARDEN

For the millions of mulchers, seeders, weeders, pruners and preeners of U.S. Suburbia and Exurbia, spring arrives in a blaze of nursery catalogues and dreams of floral glory. This month gardening buffs have been streaming through the nation's flower shows, green thumbs twitching. All winter, in fact, a surprising number of them had potting soil under their fingernails. For greenhouses are getting to be almost common-or-garden.

Rich men have had them for centuries; Tiberius Caesar raised cucumbers in a mica-covered "forcing house" when his doctor advised him to eat warm-weather vegetables the year round. But today more and more families who measure their estates in feet rather than acres are buying prefab greenhouses for the cost of a secondhand car or less, and filling the house with chrysanthemums, African violets or glossy greenery while the snow flies.

The oldest U.S. greenhouse manufacturer, Lord & Burnham of Irvington, N.Y., increased its advertising schedule this year and has already received more inquiries than it got in all of 1963. Turner Greenhouses of Goldsboro, N.C., sold $50,000 worth five years ago, while last year its sales amounted to $250,000. Turner's least expensive model is a plastic-covered 7-by-8-ft. lean-to built over the door or window of a house through which it derives its heat. A 25-by-50-ft.-square greenhouse, with all-aluminum construction, fully automatic controls, an independent oil furnace and a potting shed, can cost about $20,000. Automatic controls, available even in $1,200 models, are largely responsible for the newly broadened market; they enable owners to go off on vacation confident that proper heat, ventilation and humidity will be maintained by gadgetry that can turn on the sprinkler system, raise and lower vents, switch on the lights at night. When the owners return, they can simply walk in and start weeding.

"To keep up with the Joneses nowadays," says Manufacturer Sumpter Turner happily, "you have to raise your own tomatoes in January--as well as have plenty of orchids." But there is much more to it than green-thumb-upmanship. There is the satisfaction of growing or propagating plants for the outdoor garden instead of buying them, of cutting a spray of forsythia in midwinter and "forcing" it into a golden harbinger of spring, of watching a child's pride in his own waist-high plantation, and, not least, of dropping into a city florist's from time to time to check up on the prices. For less than $20, a greenhouse owner can buy enough seedlings to keep his house chrysanthemumed all winter long.

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