Krohn Conservatory's annual holiday display is a Cincinnati tradition. From the train sets to the hundreds of cheery poinsettias, the yuletide exhibit has been drawing and delighting visitors for decades. Preparations, however, begin while most folks are thinking about summer vacations.
"The poinsettias alone for the holiday show, I think we got 2,100," estimates Rachel Brucato, a horticulturist with Cincinnati Parks. "That's just one type of plant for the holiday show. All together we did about 8,000 plants for just one show."
Brucato says "we," but she's basically a one-woman show at the moment while the department looks to hire a second employee. Brucato runs Warder Nursery, a greenhouse operation owned by Cincinnati Parks in Springfield Township. Built in 1931, this little-known facility is responsible for growing the plants that rotate through Krohn Conservatory, while also supplying flowers to some of the city's parks.
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"The annuals are grown here for the shows that Krohn puts on — the spring show, summer show and holiday show. We just wrapped up installing the holiday show at Krohn, which opened on Saturday, so go see it — and right now we're getting started on the spring show," Brucato smiles.
Brucato estimates she grows around 24,000 plants for Krohn's spring, summer and holiday flower shows. She gets help from Krohn's newest florist, Thia Brooks. Brooks is in charge of the seasonal display showroom.
"I'm coming up here weekly to get replacement plants because sometimes things happen," Brooks says. "Sometimes somebody trips and falls and might smash a plant. Sometimes I kill a plant — you know, we're not all perfect. I spend a lot of my time back and forth from here communicating with Rachel about the plants for the shows."
Most plants are grown from plugs rather than seeds. Brucato is responsible for taking each plug, potting it and growing it in time for each show. As soon as one show is ready, she's already working on the next. The plants are placed strategically throughout the greenhouse wings so they get just the right amount of sunlight or shade.
Warder Nursery does a bit of nursing for plants, too. When plants need some extra attention, they are sent out to Burcato for TLC. The residents of Krohn's popular Orchid House spend a lot of time here as well. When an orchid finishes blooming, it's rotated out to Warder and different plants that are nearly ready to bloom are swapped in.
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"All the orchids that are in the Orchid House — if they're not in bloom, they're here rather than at Krohn," Brooks points out.
Some of the orchids are even older than Brooks and Brucato, possibly as much as 50 years old, they estimate.
"I have about 300 orchids in this house over here," says Brucato. "Over the years, they have lost the tags or they've just completely disintegrated or you can't read it anymore, so my goal is to wait for them to bloom — which if you know orchids can take a really long time sometimes — and then we need to identify them by the bloom."
The history of Warder Nursery
Prior to Warder Nursery, the parks department operated a greenhouse in Eden Park. It opened the first public greenhouse for floral displays in 1902.
Sometime in the 1920s, the city began planning for a new public greenhouse and an off-site growing facility. The Cincinnati Park Board acquired the land where the nursery sits in 1929. It was previously farmland.
The city began using Warder Nursery to raise trees, shrubs and flowers for Cincinnati parks; two nursery plots at Mt. Airy Forest and Caldwell Park had been supplying city parks until that point. The Art Deco greenhouse facility now known as Krohn Conservatory opened as the Eden Park Conservatory in 1933.
Eventually it became more costly to grow trees rather than to buy them and the city cut back to using the Warder greenhouses just for flowers. The land grew wild and the city of Cincinnati sold much of the property to Springfield Township in March 2000, save for the greenhouse, which it continues to operate.
According to park records, the nursery is named for Rueben Warder, a former Cincinnati Parks superintendent and the son of John Warder, founder of the American Forestry Service.
The first greenhouses
The greenhouses are part nostalgia, part pain-in-the-dirt. Built in 1931, according to a Cincinnati Post article, their glass windows and vents are still operated manually. There's no button to push to open them automatically.
"I have to open up the vents myself," Brucato explains, adding it's a constant back-and-forth, especially when temperatures are much cooler at night but still too hot for the plants during the day. She also has to put up shade cloths by hand if they're needed to cool the space for certain plantings. Sometimes she has to come in after hours or on days off to adjust the vents.
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A barn on the site was built in 1939 as part of the Works Progress Administration (WPA), a New Deal agency created during the Great Depression that provided public works jobs.
Growing on
Cincinnati Parks may have divested itself of much of the Warder land — which recently opened as Warder Preserve by Springfield Township — but there are big future plans for the nursery.
"After 2024, the goal is to start growing for the parks again," Brucato says. She does grow some plants, but the department is looking to bring more of that back in-house. By 2025, she'd like to see the greenhouses at Warder full of growing plants.
The Warder Nursery Plant Sale could make a return as well. The nursery currently grows some plants that are sold in the Krohn Conservatory gift shop, but the annual event selling off summer planting leftovers was a big hit with home gardeners.
"Everyone loved it. They'd come out and pick out all the extra plants that they wanted. We hope to do that again. I think 2025, I'm aiming for that," says Brucato.
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There are also plans for a biochar facility. Biochar is a charcoal-like substance created by burning plant waste and converting it into a long-lasting soil additive that can promote the growth of new trees. The Cincinnati Parks Board and Great Parks of Hamilton County announced plans for a biochar site in December 2022. Early discussions placed the site in Mt. Airy. City updates from July 2023 name Warder as the most likely location.
"Parks is starting a biochar program and it's going to be here at Warder Nursery," Brooks confirms. "So the use of this space is going to be increasing for sure over time."
