- Visiting an Old Friend

21st October 2010

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Visiting an Old Friend

The road to the NY Sheep & Wool festival in Rhinebeck was paved with visiting old haunts. I used going as an excuse to also head out the the area of my undergraduate school and where my sister lives.

So, on the cool and cloudy Friday before Rhinebeck I spend a bit of time visiting the Durfee Conservatory.

The conservatory was first built in 1867 as part of the fist land grant college in the Unites States, Mass Aggie (Massachusetts Agricultural College). It was built in a beautiful Victorian fashion and had a place to hitch your horse out front when you visited. In addition to being important for education at the school, it was a well loved escape for students and locals. It is believed that Amherst local Emily Dickinson used to visit the greenhouse.

The greenhouse today is not the original one, but it does have some of the original plants. While not being as elegant a building as the original, it does have some more modern conveniences.

As an undergraduate I spent my Senior year working in the greenhouse part time and it was wonderful to go back and see the things that are still the same and the things that have changed and finally been updated. If you are out in that area I would strongly suggest a visit. Then you can see some things like these:

The small, innocent looking flowers of the Sweet Olive (Osmanthus) which fill the first house with one of the best scents in the whole world.

The rain forest room. Warm, smelling of damp soil and green, it is filled with a myriad of fun things to find. A pond with fish, fig tree, palm trees, bananas, papyrus, monstera, tropical fruit, ginger, and many other things that flower at different times or have wonderful leaves.