Do plants and gardens inspire you and spark your imagination? Our 2025 Community Read selection takes you on one woman’s journey to create a beautiful indoor garden at her home as a place of learning and sanctuary after an inspiring visit to a public garden conservatory. What a perfect complement to our own journey in creating Longwood Reimagined / A New Garden Experience opening November 2024, which includes a stunning new conservatory, the preservation of a historic indoor garden by acclaimed Brazilian landscape architect Roberto Burle Marx, and other memorable experiences. Longwood Reimagined reflects our founder Pierre du Pont’s vision to share the joys of beauty and horticulture with all.
Paradise Under Glass: The Education of an Indoor Gardener
By Ruth Kassinger
Paradise Under Glass is a witty and absorbing memoir about one woman’s unlikely desire to build, stock, and tend a small conservatory in her suburban Maryland home.
Kassinger found herself in need of a positive path after the death of her sister, her home becoming an empty nest, and her own battle with breast cancer. A resident of Maryland, she visited the conservatory of the U.S. Botanic Garden in Washington D.C. and was inspired to add a much smaller-scale conservatory to her home. “It occurred to me that adding a conservatory to our house was just what I needed,” Kassinger says. “Warm and humid, beautiful, ever-green, peaceful and still, a conservatory would be the perfect antidote to the losses and changes of middle age. It would be my personal tropical paradise where nothing unexpected lurked in the landscape.”
Kassinger was definitely not a skilled indoor gardener before taking her conservatory leap. As an experienced writer and researcher, she knew she needed to learn about indoor gardens and how to grow indoor plants if she was to be successful—the results of which she shares in Paradise Under Glass. This wonderful combination of warm humor, personal anecdotes, and fascinating history makes for a terrific read.
The Extraordinary Gardener
By Sam Boughton
Sam Boughton’s picture book The Extraordinary Gardener is a beautifully illustrated story about a young boy seeking color in a dreary world.
Joe is a boy just like any other, but with a bigger imagination. Joe lives in an ordinary apartment building in a rather ordinary city. His world is rather gray. But he spends his time imagining a wonderful, colorful world filled with exotic plants and unusual animals. One day, Joe decides to plant a seed on his balcony. He waits and waits, but nothing happens! Joe gives up and returns to his daily life, but when he least expects it, he sees that the seed has taken root and turned into the most beautiful tree.
