The conservatories at Rippon Lea have always been a huge draw for visitors. Fashionable in Victorian times, they were built to wow guests with displays of exotic plants.
Only the very wealthy could import and nurture rare blooms.
Orchid-mania was all the rage.
Rich gentlemen like Frederick Sargood and Benjamin Nathan embraced this new hobby. They could show off envy-making plant collections in their beautiful homes.
Sargood and later Nathan built some of the finest orchid collections in Australia at Rippon Lea Estate.
Sargood returned from England in 1882 with the first cuttings of his new passion, plus a specialist gardener Adam Anderson.
Over the next 20 years he built a great orchid and exotic plant collection, housed in a cutting-edge complex of glasshouses.
Sargood’s showpiece was a large display glasshouse near the fernery (now lost). Two cast-iron conservatories attached to the dining room and west terrace showed the finest and rarest orchids to house visitors.
These conservatories had glass barrel-vaulted roofs and fan windows. They were inspired by the Royal Exhibition Building in Melbourne and London’s Crystal Palace.
Sargood’s teenage daughters even persuaded him to convert one large conservatory into a ballroom for them. The ballroom could easily fit 400-500 people. They told him he had enough conservatories already!
Benjamin Nathan was an avid gardener, and he later bought Rippon Lea because of its beautiful gardens and hothouses. He built an even larger collection of rare orchids and tropical flowers, which won many awards.
He constructed a huge show conservatory, the largest in Victoria, near the house entrance.
Under glass at Rippon Lea he nurtured more than 2000 orchids, of several hundred species and varieties. He constantly added new imports from the great orchid nurseries in England and beyond.
He won many prizes and awards for his orchids and fellow enthusiasts were always welcomed to visit.
”The really magnificent conservatory is well worth a visit from anyone desirous of seeing the largest and handsomest glass-house in Victoria, and perhaps the finest in the Commonwealth. It is 110ft in length…and filled with the choicest of plants from nearly all parts of the world” (Australasian, 22 July 1916)
After Nathan’s death in 1935, his daughter Louisa remodeled the estate to her tastes. The expensive hothouses were sold, the orchids auctioned off. The south conservatory gave way to a new ballroom complex.
Today, you can still visit the remaining cast iron drawing room conservatory and view the remnant floor tiles of the south conservatory outside the ballroom.
