Tradition is an exceptionally important component of this current generation of conservatories following a period somewhat dominated by uniform uPVC sunrooms, with an emphasis on bespoke design, expert craftsmanship and a respect for the great conservatories of the past.
Typically, the starting point for a lot of conservatory designs from the best suppliers and builders is the Golden Age of Conservatories which began with the project at Syon House in the 1820s.
This was, however, already part of centuries of evolution of what began as traditional unglazed orangeries, most notably including The Orangery at the Palace of Versailles.
This was the starting point of the conservatory as we recognise the concept today; it was a beautiful building that intermingled the indoors and the outdoors, whilst providing a shelter for exotic plants which may not have survived the colder climates found in the South of France, to say nothing of the United Kingdom.
However, whilst this was the first recognisable conservatory and the starting point of many discussions about traditional design, it was not the oldest conservatory in history.
Even discounting the Hanging Gardens of Babylon, a prototypical conservatory/rooftop garden with no conclusive evidence of its existence, there is some historical evidence that suggests the conservatory is thousands of years older than we think it is.
The Dawn Of The Specularia
Much like how the early evolution of the orangery was to provide an artificial environment to grow the eponymous then-exotic citrus fruit, the early conservatory was claimed to have been designed to grow cucumbers.
This was based on two major agricultural texts written during the Roman Empire, with Columella’s De Re Rustica and Pliny The Elder’s Historia Naturalis both citing a very similar story and both being mistranslated for years.
The fruit in question was not in fact the cucumber (Cucumis sativus), but instead was the very similar Cucumis melo var. flexuosus. This fruit is more commonly known as an Armenian cucumber or snake melon and is part of the same species as the cantaloupe and honeydew melon.
Whilst this mistranslation is almost universal in all translations of both texts into modern languages, the cucumber is not believed to have appeared in Europe until nearly a millennium after the fall of the Roman Empire, circa 1335.
According to Pliny the Elder, Emperor Tiberius was particularly fond of the vegetable melon, and demanded that he had at least one on his dinner table every single day, come rain or shine.
Because whatever the Emperor wanted, the Emperor would receive, and Tiberius was a rather infamous tyrant during his period of isolation in his palace on the island of Capri, architects, botanists and kitchen gardeners looked to whichever innovative solutions they could think of at the time to achieve what was seen at the time to be fairly impossible.
It is possible, albeit rather unlikely, that Columella himself was either involved in the process or the mysterious “Publius Silvinus” that he addresses throughout De Re Rustica was one of the main figures involved in making this happen.
It was not necessarily common knowledge at the time, at least not from Columella himself, whose work was said to have been “but little read” during his life. Many of his sources are even rarer to the point of widely being accepted as lost texts, which might include the inspiration for the original orangery.
Regardless, Columella’s solution, one that was either copied at the Villa Jovis or that he wrote about having learned about the apparatus, was to plant the Armenian cucumbers in mobile baskets that are kept outside during warmer days.
When the weather turned rather more wintry, however, they would be moved under cover manually.
Pliny the Elder went further and described the covered frames as having been made with “mirrorstone”, which is believed to be lapis specularis, a transparent form of calcium sulphate more commonly known as selenite.
The result will have resembled an orangery or a sunroom, albeit with windows made of stone rather than glass. Whilst the Romans had already developed transparent (or at least translucent) glass at the time, the method of constructing it would have made the orangery cost too much, take too long or both.
Selenite was more widely available, stonework was more readily understood, and since the glass didn’t need to be clearly seen through but instead provide some light for the snake melons, it was considered more than suitable for their purpose, even if they wouldn’t have made for a pleasant experience by modern standards.
They were largely mounting frames rather than full conservatories, with room for the snake melons and very little else, but the method worked extremely well at least if Pliny’s account is to be believed.
The Emperor Tiberius, known for his infamous cruelty during his time in seclusion and unlikely to have accepted compromise for his demands for fresh cucumbers every day of the year, seemed to indeed get what he wanted, thanks to a prototypical conservatory design.
Sadly, once Tiberius died in 37 AD, the concept was largely lost to time. His successor, Caligula, was known for his extravagant architectural projects, leaving what was at the time an innovative and potentially highly influential solution lost in the shuffle.
Once the Roman Empire fell, the conservatory was one of many innovations that was lost during the Middle Ages; during rather difficult and tumultuous times the indulgences of growing exotic fruits and vegetables were a luxury few could afford.
This was starting to change during the Renaissance, as a lot of Roman-era books, technologies and cultural ideas were rediscovered, and it is possible, although there is little proof that this is the case, that Columella’s innovations led to the development of early orangeries.
The book was rediscovered in full in its original Latin no later than 1418, and early orangeries constructed based on similar principles to the ones in Ancient Rome had been constructed as early as 1545 in Italy.
There is no proof that the building in Padua nor John Parkinson’s advice for growing oranges in England were directly inspired by Columella’s work, but there is at least the chance that the history of conservatories spans thousands of years.