Royal Greenhouses of Laeken

Yesterday Naomi and I took time off in the morning to tour the Royal Greenhouses of Laeken, the Belgium royalty's greenhouses on the residential palace property in Brussels. It's something of a big deal, in part because the greenhouses are big, extensive, and beautiful, and in part because they're only open to the public a few weeks out of the year.

The line of people waiting to get in was nontrivial, but it moved along ok. Once inside, you had the option of moving with the masses at their glacially slow pace, or separating yourself and moving even slower. Unlike a typical museum, for example, there was no way you could cruise through the greenhouses; once you were in, you were committed to about two hours of slowly walking. The path through the greenhouses was linear (although not straight). There were a few large round or rectangular greenhouses, and there were smaller, longer and straight greenhouses ("greenhallways" would be more apt). One stretch of the circuit was actually outdoors; the grounds were nice, and some of the grounds were very nice. The grounds and greenhouses were essentially devoid of insects, Naomi observed, which was especially odd given all the flowers.

The plants weren't generally labelled, and I don't know whether many of them were rare. Plenty of the plants were garden variety (rim shot, please), such as African violet, and others that I recognized but don't know by name. But plenty were otherwise unknown to me. In any case, the greenhouses were quite beautiful with well-designed gardens, and the large greenhouse buildings themselves were beautiful. And collectively the greenhouses were very large, even larger than they looked from the exterior.

Ironically, I'm not sure I would have been jonesing to go to the greenhouses if they were open all year 'round—not that I wouldn't want to go, but maybe other destinations would be more attractive—but the scant availability to tourists somehow sweetened the deal, and I'm glad we went.