Ever blooming


Wherever Ingrid Conant lives, she surrounds herself with flowers. Now settled on Sunfish Lake, she has created a tropical paradise in her home's conservatory.

MARGE HOLS

Whoever said "Bloom where you are planted" must have been thinking about Ingrid Conant. Wherever Conant lands — from Norway to New York City to Minnesota with asides to Connecticut and Iowa — this intrepid gardener surrounds herself with flowers.

As a child in Kristiansand on the southernmost tip of Norway, Conant says, she provided "slave labor" for her grandfather's garden, planting vast quantities of tulip bulbs each fall and digging and storing them after blooming in spring.

When work as an accountant took her in 1965 to New York City, where she met and married Roger Conant, she still found ways to garden. She organized balcony and window box gardens at their 24th Street apartment and planted daffodils and crocuses at their Litchfield, Conn., town house retreat.

After the Conants moved to Minnesota in 1985, Ingrid Conant began gardening on a larger scale at their Sunfish Lake home. She created a prairie over the septic system, calling it "the ocean" because it was a sea of pink.

Then, she became a farmer. In 1987, she bought a farm in Iowa as an investment and, in 1995, a second one. Conant quickly mastered the language of corn and soybeans. She also started her own dried-flower business and for seven years grew flowers in the super-fertile soil where cattle had been kept next to a barn.

When an opportunity arose in 1989 to move down the lane to a home right on Sunfish Lake, Conant surrounded the house with beds of perennials and annuals. Home renovations led to a second-floor sunroom for her indoor gardening endeavors and then, three years ago, to construction of a conservatory.

On a December visit, like moth to flame, I wended my way through Conant's home into this tropical paradise. Conant has filled the glass house with exotic plants gathered from around the world. The contrast between the colorful landscape inside and the wintry Minnesota woods and lake outside is dramatic, yet simultaneously soothing and restful. Providing a transition are Conant's beloved bright-colored wild birds — woodpeckers, finches and cardinals — flitting about feeders just outside the glass.

YEAR-ROUND COMFORT

'I've always wanted a greenhouse," says Conant, immediate past president of the St. Paul Garden Club. "We sit here every morning, read our paper, have our coffee. Roger has a radio set to classical music. It's a room where you get away from it all. Also, I love to pluck and touch the plants — as they say, get your nails dirty all year round." Although Conant loves to "just sit and read and watch the birds," she admits such inactivity never lasts long.

"I see a leaf hanging or a plant drooping and I'm up again. It's an everyday job, don't you feel?" she asks this fellow conservatory gardener. When she travels, her younger son, Nicholas, or a neighbor tends her plants.

"This is a terrific room," says Roger Conant, an international investment consultant. "I was reasonably unenthusiastic about putting it up, but now I think it's a really good idea. It's added a lot to our lives."

The conservatory was manufactured by Sunshine Rooms in Wichita, Kan., (www.sunshinerooms.com) and installed by Bill Persson of Solarium Designs in Shorewood (www.solarium designs.net). The 15- by 16-foot structure is attached to the house at the family room.

Persson excavated 6 feet of soil, installed footings and filled the hole with sand before pouring the concrete slab floor. A sturdy aluminum structure supports the insulated, tempered glass roof, walls and two doors. Radiant heat in the slate-colored, vinyl-tiled floor is supplemented by the sun most days and by three electric radiators on icy nights. Windows just above the floor and operating vents in the 11-foot-high ceiling provide ventilation. A fan and air conditioner cool the room on hot summer days. Shade from a honey locust tree keeps summer sun from burning plants, making shade cloth unnecessary.

BORROWED TREASURES

Conant furnished the conservatory with contemporary chairs cushioned in terra-cotta suede cloth and a patterned rug in blue, terra-cotta and cream, all from Ikea. She repeated the blue color by painting plant stands and pots.

Plants fill windowsills, tables, plant stands and even a battered blue bench. All were chosen because they will tolerate a temperature as low as 50 degrees. Conant moves her rhizomatous begonias, which prefer a low of 60 degrees, into the house during the coldest months.

Among winter bloomers are bougainvillea, Christmas cactus, Dipladenia 'Red Riding Hood,' hibiscus and heirloom geraniums, including a plump 'Mrs. Parker' with pale pink blossoms and variegated green-white foliage. Moth orchids are deliriously happy, each with four bloom stalks.

"What makes it fun is, I can say, 'This plant is from Mary (Stanley), that plant is from Charlotte (Drake) and this one is yours,' says Conant, pointing to a variegated 'Prince Rupert' scented geranium I started for her from a cutting.

Cacti and succulents lend an architectural element to the plant collection. A bluish echeveria puts on a show with three bloom stalks. A sedum 'Autumn Joy,' which Conant brought in from her garden in 1995, blooms nonstop, although she notes it's losing vigor.

Conant propagates plants on a light cart in the conservatory. She's currently rooting a stem cutting from her hydrangea hedge and leaf cuttings from an eyelash begonia. A baby clivia grown from seed harvested at the Sydney Botanical Garden in Australia has just sprouted a shoot.

When insects invade her plants, which is inevitable in a glass house, Conant does not reach for pesticides.

"If you see something, you have to get at it," she says. "You can't really wait unless you want to lose all your plants. Sometimes, I have bug trouble on the hibiscus. I take them to the kitchen sink and wash with lots of soapy water or mix up Dawn in a spray bottle and spray them every few days. And, sometimes, I just cut them all the way down."

Marge Hols is a Master Gardener with the University of Minnesota Extension Service. She can be reached at dmholscomcast.net. Garden Path will appear the first Saturday of each month through March, then weekly through the growing season.

Posted on Sat, Jan. 06, 2007