Prospect Heights

Snow what if the polar vortex is back? There’s a tropical oasis at Brooklyn Botanic Garden

January 21, 2014 By Lore Croghan Brooklyn Daily Eagle
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Oh, to be in the tropics when it’s snowing in Brooklyn.

You smarty-pants who went to warm-weather climes for the long Martin Luther King Birthday weekend came back just in time for the onset of a new Polar Vortex, promising several inches of snow and 9-degree temps.

What with massive flight cancellations at area airports Tuesday, your best bet for an escape is the Brooklyn Botanic Garden.

The Steinhardt Conservatory, with its stunning greenhouses full of heat-loving plants and vivid flowers, is the hottest spot in Brooklyn – unless you join a gym and hunker down in its sauna all afternoon.

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As long as getting there doesn’t give you frostbite, BBG’s greenhouses are an awesome place to laugh off the Arctic cold.

The Tropical Pavilion is a dream come true – so steamy that condensation is dripping off the leaves of the palm trees.

Next door, the Helen Mattin Warm Temperate Pavilion feels as good as it sounds.

The cactus room is a little bit chilly because that’s the way those prickly plants like it. The other greenhouses are warm and lush, and the snowfall outside is reduced to a whisper on glass roofs overhead.

You don’t have to be one of Brooklyn’s many avid gardeners to be thoroughly charmed. This is an inviting oasis even for those who don’t know a bromeliad from a bougainvillea. (Indeed, even those who can’t spell bougainvillea without help from Dictionary.com are wowed. Trust us on this.)

And you don’t need sled dogs to get there either – workers were out in force Tuesday with shovels and snow blowers, clearing paths for intrepid moms pushing strollers.

An added plus: weekday visits to the famed garden on Eastern Parkway are free in the wintertime.

When you’ve had your fill of strolling the perpetually summery garden paths, an art gallery space that connects the greenhouses shares their balmy temps. It has benches where you can while away the afternoon reading.

How about some Shelley – who survived the freakish Summer of 1816,  when the weather in Western Europe was so cold it snowed in July:

“O, Wind, If Winter comes, can Spring be far behind?”

 


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