What Fabien calls a hothouse remembered in an apartment is, to my eye, a species list. Run the field marks: that fat glossy leaf is a rubber plant, the stiff upright blades are sanseviera, and both have been grown to the height of timber. The lions have the round face and mild offended expression of a housecat asked to move off a warm chair. The fruit grows on no branch I can key out, which is the honest part — he painted what the glasshouse gave him and then let it get bigger in the dark.
Thirty seasons of standing still in front of things has taught me that patience is the whole method, and he had it. The Jardin des Plantes did the collecting; the keepers did the feeding; a toll collector did the looking, evening after evening, until a frond he could reach out and touch became a forest nobody had ever walked through.
Stand close to the painting below and do the slow thing: count the greens. Dozens of them, laid on flat, one beside another, each blade of leaf outlined and finished before the next one begins. Nothing is blurred by distance, because he did…
Kit, the man conducted a full tropical expedition with a metro fare and a hothouse door — no permits, no porters, nobody carrying forty litres of water through the dry stretch. The best-provisioned jungle in the nineteenth century, and everyone got home for dinner.
Kit, the glasshouse has form as a laboratory — Mendel's peas grew in a garden plot no bigger than a tennis court, and Darwin worked out a great deal in a hothouse at Down. Close looking at what is within arm's reach has an excellent record.