2024 – Montreal Botanical Garden

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. Press facility director this week.

Last January, a group of visitors were there when glass fell from the wall of an exhibition greenhouse. No one was hurt.

But engineers determined the incident was “accidental and unpredictable,” prompting the Botanic Garden to close all greenhouses in advance, Montreal Botanic Garden Director José Bellemare said by phone.

“We decided to close the exhibition and production greenhouses for research,” he explained. Since then, some production sectors have been reopened to staff to provide watering and maintenance of the growing plants. The exhibition greenhouses will be reopened to the public only after extensive protective nets have been installed, M. continued.ⁱ Bellemare. The prototype should be tested in June. Tenders and construction site may be announced later.

Greenhouses attract visitors, said the director of the institution.

“From an area point of view, this is very small compared to the 75 hectares of the Botanical Garden,” he said. But “from a collections point of view, these controlled environments (…) certainly allow for the display of plants that cannot be displayed outside.” So it's fundamental. »

The second episode

For the second time since last summer, the Botanical Garden has faced major problems in the greenhouse.

On June 24, 2023, eight glasses of mercury fell from the roof of the industrial greenhouse, falling to the ground and onto the tables near the workers. No one was hurt, but “some were shaken,” the Botanical Garden said at the time. Since 2017-2018, again, less severe episodes have occurred once or twice a year, depending on the institution.

That year, the Botanic Garden installed a mechanical system to open and close some of the greenhouse windows to control the temperature and humidity inside, a task that had previously been done manually. It was this system, even though it was only six years old, that caused problems last season.

The Commission on Standards, Equality, Occupational Safety and Health (CNESST) found that about forty other industrial greenhouses equipped with the same system were “at risk of falling glass”.

The January incident remains unexplained, but engineers have been able to rule out the possibility of a mechanical system being involved.

The Botanical Garden is not the only municipal museum with greenhouse headaches. Last July, Press discovered that the new Montreal Insectarium, built in the form of a greenhouse, experienced the problem of overheating when exposed to sunlight. The architecturally acclaimed building is undergoing an additional $1 million in work to fix the problem.

Read “New Montreal insectarium heats up.”