5. The Greenhouse at Barnard

Barnard has a Greenhouse on campus! The Arthur Ross Greenhouse is on the roof of Milbank Hall for Barnard’s Department of Biological Sciences. This new faculty built greenhouse replaced the 1928 greenhouse built for Edmund W. Sinnot (a Barnard professor from 1928-1940) because the old greenhouse started to have issues with heating, plumbing, and ventilation systems and this greatly limited the utility of the greenhouse.

The new Arthur Ross greenhouse has a custom-designed aluminum and glass shell, fully computerized heating, cooling, ventilation, lighting and watering systems to provide independent, automatic climate control. The central room functions as a general public space and conservatory and houses the teaching collection. Each room within the greenhouse can be entered independently because there is a central corridor; additionally, there is a small passenger elevator to provide access for the disable and to transport plants and supplies.

The greenhouse has plants that are extremely diverse that are from almost every continent and biome. There are more than 450 species of plants of cultural, medicinal, or culinary importance within the greenhouse. One of the plants Barnard is most proud of us the corpse-flower (Amorphophallus titanium ortitan arum). which has grown from an invisible storage organ to a gigantic ten-foot tall leaf in only 6 weeks. Barnard anticipates that in one of the upcoming years, the corpse-flower will reach a 12 or 15 foot bloom which would be the world’s largest floral display (that would be accompanied with a bad odor).