New York news: as the city bakes in the heat, Louise Nicholson relaxes in the latest high-tech addition to the Bronx's best-kept secret, the Botanical Garden

Apollo, August, 2005 by Louise Nicholson

While Central Park is packed with New Yorkers imprisoned in the city during the steamy summer heat, the New York Botanical Garden up in the Bronx is absurdly under-visited--and for no apparent reason. It has just about everything a New Yorker could wish for in a garden: manicured lawns, natural woodlands, an open-air laboratory of assiduously labelled plants and trees, an exotic conservatory complex, and cafes that stock both coffee and Chardonnay. From Grand Central station it is a brief ride to the garden gates.

It also has the newly opened Nolen Greenhouses for Living Collections. Designed by Jan Keane and James Braddock of New York architects Mitchell/Giurgola, they cover almost an acre of growing space divided into eight climate zones. In their grassy dell at the far end of the garden, they do not look remarkable: just bigger, sleeker and more handsome versions of fairly regular pitch-roofed greenhouses. Made of tempered sheets of glass held in a trussed steel structure, they do not aim to be ostentatious--that is left for the dramatic and recently renovated public Haupt Conservatory Range at the other end of the gardens, built in 1896-1902 in the tradition of Decimus Burton's Palm House at Kew. Rather, the Nolan buildings, with just one public area, take the working greenhouse to a new level of technology to provide precisely controlled climate zones for the orchids, palms, cacti and other study collections, and to grow the plants that later stock the surrounding gardens. Shading, cooling and humidity are regulated by evaporative coolers, heat radiates from the floor, and water-conserving drip and mist systems provide moisture.

In essence, this is a refinement of what a greenhouse has always done: control temperature, humidity and light so that exotic plants can be grown outside their natural climates and produce flowers and fruits out of season. With the rise of the greenhouse in mid-nineteenth-century America, the glazed and heated glasshouse was modified and popularised as new materials and prefabricated buildings became inexpensive. Lord & Burnham Co, founded in 1856, became North America's biggest manufacturer of glasshouses. Paxton's Crystal Palace and the success of the Great Exhibition in London inspired American private enterprise: in 1853, New York's own Exhibition of All Nations was held in Bryant Park in a Crystal Palace whose Greek-cross plan had a high central dome. P.T. Barnum took it over in 1854 but four years later it burnt down.

The taste for a grand public glasshouse was born. Earlier, the United States's first botanical garden, the Elgin Botanic Garden, was established in New York in 1801 on twenty acres of land then well out of town, where the Rockefeller Centre stands today. The central glasshouse had two lean-to hothouses, one dry for cacti, the other humid for tropical plants. By 1810 it was closed, and it was not until 1891 that the New York Botanical Garden was created. The site was selected by the landscape designers Calvert Vaux and Calvert Parsons Jnr. It incorporates a beautiful gorge of the Bronx River, a tract of virgin hemlock forest, and the Lorillard estate, which includes a riverside stone snuff mill of 1840.

The flamboyant Haupt complex followed swiftly, constructed by Lord & Burnham. Today, its galleries are devoted to plants of the Americas and grand annual displays. In bringing together the practical and the public functions of glasshouse architecture, the Nolen Greenhouses seem still to pursue the observation of John Loudon in his 1822 Encyclopaedia of Gardening: that the 'great object' of glasshouse architecture is 'the admission of light and the power of applying heat with the least labour and expense'.

Bronze and stone sculptures of Hindu deities, the Buddha and Bodhisattvas are not easy for the uninitiated to enjoy. So the Asia Society's small and well-displayed exhibition (until 18 September; www.asiasociety.org) of fifty choice pieces is welcome; it could well serve as a blueprint to larger museums for how to introduce a complex art subject. Adriana Proser, the exhibition's curator, made her selection from the magnificent gift of about 260 works given to the society in 1978 by Mr and Mrs John D. Rockefeller III, who were instrumental in the society's founding. (2006, the society's fiftieth year, will be marked with a landmark art show honouring the promotion of Asian art by various Rockefeller family members.) The theme is this: Hinduism and Buddhism have their origins in India, and as they spread to Nepal, Thailand, Burma, Cambodia and Tibet their rituals and art responded to local traditions and power forces. This is clear to see when comparing the images of, say, a flirtatious Shiva and Parvati made under Pala rule in north-east India (right) with a full-length Buddha made in seventh-century Thailand that mixes the styles of Sarnath in India with local Mon characteristics.