The greenhouses of the Montreal Botanical Garden have been closed to the public since the beginning of the year and will remain so for months, indicated to The Press the director of the institution this week.
Posted at 1:36 a.m.
Updated at 7:00 a.m.
A glass pane fell from the wall of an exhibition greenhouse last January, when a group of visitors were there. No one was hurt.
But engineers determined that this event was “random and unpredictable”, which forced the management of the Botanical Garden to close all its greenhouses preventively, Josée Bellemare, director of the Montreal Botanical Garden, reported by telephone.
“We decided to close the exhibition and production greenhouses to investigate,” she explained. Since then, certain production sectors have been reopened to employees, so that they can ensure watering and maintenance of growing plants. The exhibition greenhouses will only be reopened to the public after the large-scale installation of protective grilles, continued Mme Bellemare. A prototype should be tested in June. A call for tenders and a construction site could follow.
The greenhouses constitute an important attraction for visitors, indicated the director of the institution.
“From an area perspective, it’s really small compared to the 75 hectares of the Botanical Garden,” she said. But “from a collections point of view, it is certain that these controlled environments […] allow you to show plants that cannot be shown outside. So, it’s fundamental. »
Second episode
This was the second time since last summer that the Botanical Garden has encountered major problems with its greenhouses.
On June 24, 2023, eight panes of glass shattered in the ceiling of a production greenhouse before falling to the ground and onto tables near workers. No one was injured, but “some were shaken,” the Botanical Garden reported at the time. Less serious episodes have occurred once or twice a year since 2017-2018, again depending on the institution.
That year, the Botanical Garden installed a mechanical system for opening and closing certain greenhouse panes in order to control the temperature and humidity inside, a job previously done manually. It is this system, although only six years old, which caused problems last June.
The Commission for Standards, Equity, Health and Safety at Work (CNESST) had judged that “the risk of falling glass is also present” in around forty other production greenhouses equipped with the same system.
The January incident is still unexplained, but engineers were able to rule out the possibility that this mechanical system was involved.
The Botanical Gardens isn’t the only municipal museum experiencing headaches from its greenhouses. Last July, The Press revealed that the brand new Montreal Insectarium, built in the shape of a greenhouse, experienced problematic overheating when the sun shines outside. The building, whose architecture has been praised, is undergoing an additional $1 million in work to resolve the problem.
Read “The new Montreal Insectarium is overheating”
