Highland Park – Lamberton Conservatory & Warner Castle

Friends from Arizona visited briefly this past week.  While Charlie and Mike golfed, Cindy helped me discover another part of Rochester that was unfamiliar to me – Highland Park (I’ve missed the Lilac Festival both years we’ve been here!).  We started at Lamberton Conservatory – a miniature version of the New York Botanical Garden. With only 1800 square feet, you can easily breeze through in 5-10 minutes, but it’s worth lingering to admire the collection of really odd-looking plants.  There isn’t very much information about the Conservatory on-line, maybe because it’s owned by the Monroe County Department of Parks, and they don’t have the budget to keep a website updated.  I did learn from rocwiki.org that the Conservatory was originally constructed in 1911 but was totally reconstructed in 2007, and that it is named for a president of the parks board.

The first room is the Seasonal Display House, which changes five times a year.  Passing into the Epiphytes, Orchids, Ferns and Exotics section, a sign on the door warned to be careful of quail underfoot, which we weren’t lucky enough to see (I’m wondering if they would be the same type of button quail you find at the Strong Museum’s butterfly exhibit?).  

We did see lots of turtles, oddly

huddled together.  This section and the Tropical Dome had some of the most interesting plants – Spanish Moss, giant palms, and things with roots that looked like immobilized snakes. 

The Desert Environment  contains an abundance of succulents, including something interesting that looked exactly like its name:  the String of Pearls.  The House Plants room had what you might expect there, and I think that’s also where we saw the vine called Aristolochia gigantea, with its bizarre flowers.  We missed the Courtyard Garden (I only discovered there was such a thing when I read the brochure later at home).  I guess I’ll just have to plan another trip back, perhaps when the seasonal displays turn to winter!

Warner Castle is an odd building, modeled on a Scottish castle, and it’s obviously seen better days.  It isn’t what I expected – apparently you can take a self-guided tour, which we were too late to do, but in just poking around, it appears that the interior is used mostly for offices and functions, not as place to tour and get a feel for how it looked in Horatio Warner’s time (there was no period furniture, for example).  

The “castle” is home to the Rochester Civic Garden Center, and boasts a lovely sunken garden, which Cindy and I remarked would be a lovely spot for a wedding photo (and indeed, it is for rent for just such thing!).  It isn’t planted, though, and a volunteer who was working on the perimeter garden explained that they hadn’t yet raised the funds or come to an agreement on a plan for that garden, so any color in that space is at least a couple of years away.

I’ll obviously have to return here, as well, to take the self-guided tour and see what I missed!