Princess Elisabeth of Belgium in the Royal Greenhouses,Brussels.Credit:Corbis
The beautiful royal gardens are about to throw open their greenhouses to the public for their yearly three-week stint,writes Kate Farrelly.
The brainchild of a greedy king obsessed with exotic plants and an architect on the cusp of a new era in architecture,the Royal Greenhouses of Laeken are among the world's greatest.
Every year in spring these spectacular structures in the private gardens of the Belgian royal family are open to the general public for a fleeting,three-week period. For a trifling $3 you can meander through the 2½-hectare complex,mouth agape at the utter indulgence exercised by King Leopold II back in the late 1800s.
The Royal Greenhouses,Brussels.Credit:Corbis
Located in the park of the Royal Castle of Laeken in Brussels,Belgium's capital,the greenhouses are bursting with spring blossoms and countless plants from far-flung countries. They march down a gentle slope covering a distance close to 1 kilometre. It's worth wearing your walking shoes as you wind your way through the interconnected"glass city". You might spend longer still if,like me,you feel compelled to snap a photo of every gorgeous flower you come across.
We arrived early and did not encounter the maddening queues I had heard about,although the crowds swelled as the morning progressed. But nothing could spoil the pleasure of this dream-like botanical bounty,far removed from the chocolate-chomping and beer-guzzling pursuits offered elsewhere in Brussels.
Of course,you don't need to be botanically-minded to enjoy your visit. It's the supreme lushness of the flora and sheer audacity of the architecture that makes the greenhouses such a popular attraction with the locals.
In the Great Gallery there are walkways filled with climbing geraniums where a multitude of fuchsia varieties create a floral canopy overhead. The Azalea House offers up a profusion of multicoloured blooms,and in the Orangery many of the citrus trees are more than 200 years old. The Embarcadere greenhouse is home to large oriental pots collected by Leopold in the Far East and now filled with Malaysian orchids. The collection of over 100 species of camellia is said to be the oldest and largest of its kind.
The centrepiece of the complex is the enormous Winter Garden greenhouse with its 25-metre-high dome,topped by a lantern and a giant crown. A circular,stone colonnade of 36 columns supports the metal framework. Inside you'll find dozens of different palms,from the towering Australian cabbage-tree palm,which grazes the top of the dome,to the ornamental Mexican fan palm. Leopold bought many of the original palms from private Belgian collections and had them transported on railway wagons drawn by 20 horses plodding through the night.