Cities Cultivate Plans for New Facilities, Renovations

At a recent seminar in New York City, devotees from all over the United States gave status reports on their efforts to build plant conservatories to preserve or show off rare and exotic plants.

Many of the new conservatories and renovations of existing facilities, including the proposed $7-million Moody Gardens in Galveston, Tex., are still in the planning stages, although some have firm opening dates.

Some examples:

* The $4.1-million Olbrich Botanical Gardens in Madison, Wis., is building a 10,000-square-foot, diamond-shaped conservatory that will be open to the public in 1991.

* Salt Lake City would like to have a conservatory at the State Arboretum of Utah by 1994.

* Chicago already has spent more than $1 million restoring its two conservatories and will put an additional $2.1 million into the Garfield Park Conservatory and $650,000 into the Lincoln Park Conservatory.

* The spectacular Longwood Gardens in Longwood, Pa., once part of the duPont estate, reopened one greenhouse last year after a $725,000 renovation. Longwood is the showiest of any American conservatory with more than four acres under glass. It has an annual operating budget of $7 million to $8 million.

* A new $1.8-million atrium at the Cowles Conservatory in Minneapolis, which features art work as well as plants, has opened.

* A $12-million renovation of the New York Botanical Garden’s Enid A. Haupt Conservatory is in the planning stages. Also in New York, the Queens Botanical Gardens is planning a conservatory.

* The 40,000-square-foot Phipps Conservatory in Pittsburgh was renovated in 1987.

* Callaway Garden’s Cecil B. Day Butterfly Center in Pine Mountain, Ga., an 8,000-square-foot conservatory costing $5.8 million and featuring a display of tropical butterflies, opened in 1988.

* A 3,700-square-foot tropical display house, costing about half a million dollars, is scheduled to open March 31 at the Norfolk, Va., Botanical Gardens.