The renovated Climate Greenhouse of Hortus Amsterdam will be officially reopened on 10 September. Photo: Ilka Schumacher – ZJA Architects.
Amsterdam’s Hortus Botanicus is a small but well-visited botanical garden. With its renovated, gas-free Climate Greenhouse, it is making a significant step towards sustainability whilst putting the Cape flora firmly in the spotlight.
‘Wet winters, very dry summers and a great deal of wind. These are the climatic conditions that shaped the unique Cape flora, and which we try to replicate here. We alternate flowering bulbous plants, annuals and shrubs to give visitors a sense of the dynamic that allowed such a remarkably species-rich flora to develop in South Africa’, says Iris van Kleinwee, collection specialist at Hortus Botanicus Amsterdam. The biologist, who trained in Ghent, is leading a tour of the renovated Climate Greenhouse of Hortus Amsterdam on a swelteringly hot summer’s day – the greenhouse will be officially reopened on 10 September by mayor Femke Halsema.
Climate Greenhouse
The Climate Greenhouse – formerly the Three-Climate Greenhouse – allows visitors to experience three compartments with all their senses: tropical rainforest, desert, and the subtropical Cape flora. ‘We want to show how important climate is for biodiversity. To that end, we introduce a plant as ambassador in each system. For the tropics, that is the Swiss cheese plant, an epiphyte that illustrates how the rainforest is all about competition: rapid growth and capturing light’, says Van Kleinwee. ‘In the desert section, visitors can see how the American agave and the African aloe resemble each other closely – an example of convergent evolution.’ In the Cape greenhouse, the Ericas stand as symbols of the enormous variation and biodiversity that arises through climatic dynamics.
Waterfall
The Cape flora is exceptionally species-rich and encompasses the iconic proteas (Protea), Cape bulbs, hundreds of species of heather (Erica), and Pelargonium species. ‘Seeds and plants from the Cape have been finding their way into our collection since colonial times’, says Van Kleinwee. Around 2018, this continued with the acquisition of the Pelargonium collection from the French plant-breeding company Syngenta, and through recent exchanges with five botanical gardens in South Africa. To give the Cape collection a truly prominent place, the compartment was even swapped with the rainforest during the greenhouse reconstruction. ‘Cape flora needs a great deal of sunlight, so it now occupies the canal-facing side, whilst the rainforest has moved to the interior.’ The tropical section still features a pond – now also home to Victoria water lilies – and a walkway along the tree canopy. New is the spectacular six-metre-high waterfall running alongside paving slabs that conceal the technical service area from view.
On 1 July, an artwork and a bed of Hugo de Vries plants were unveiled as a tribute
For propagation and as a back-up, the Hortus has the Overtuin: a greenhouse complex and seed storage facility not open to the public, located on the other side of the Hortusplantsoen. Hortus Amsterdam houses around four thousand plant species and a butterfly house. At just 1.2 hectares, it is extremely compact and within walking distance of Waterlooplein and the moorings used by canal-tour boats. In 2024 – with the greenhouse closed for renovation – it attracted around 180,000 paying visitors, compared with 240,000 the year before. ‘With the renovated greenhouse, we are aiming to grow to around 250,000 visitors’, says Van Kleinwee.
Hugo de Vries
The Amsterdam garden began in 1638 as a Hortus Medicus elsewhere in the city, but settled in the Plantagebuurt in 1682. The Hortus was once a staging post on the journey that the coffee plant (Coffea arabica) made from Africa to Central and South America, but it also gained worldwide renown through the experimental research that the Amsterdam botanist Hugo de Vries (1848–1935) conducted there in the previous century on evening primroses. To keep this celebrated biologist in the Netherlands, Amsterdam University built a complete laboratory (now a business centre) and a Palm Greenhouse on the site in 1915. On 1 July, an artwork and a bed of Hugo de Vries plants were unveiled as a tribute, close to the half-red systematic garden that illustrates the plant systematics of flowering plants.
The artwork in honour of the botanist Hugo de Vries, by artist Gijs Assmann, installed on 1 July at Hortus Botanicus Amsterdam, just in front of the former Hugo de Vries Laboratory. Photo: Moebius.
Since 1990, the Hortus has been an independent foundation, having been part of the University of Amsterdam for over a century. To become a public garden again – which it had always been before 1877 – the Three-Climate Greenhouse was opened in 1993. ‘That greenhouse has now been completely renovated, and we hope to show people of all ages the beauty and diversity of plants’, says Van Kleinwee. ‘Tourists, Amsterdammers and friends of the Hortus, but we also warmly welcome schoolchildren, students and researchers to our educational oasis.’
ORGANISATION: Hortus Botanicus Amsterdam
PRODUCT: education and recreation in a living plant collection
STRUCTURE: foundation
LOCATION: Plantagebuurt, Amsterdam
NUMBER OF STAFF: 75 (plus 70 volunteers)
YEAR FOUNDED: 1638 (Hortus Medicus) & 1990 (Foundation)
TURNOVER: €4.5 million in 2024
WEBSITE: www.dehortus.nl
NOTABLE FACTS: now home to a dedicated Hugo de Vries monument and a fully renovated CO2-neutral Three-Climate Greenhouse