Even little Mary Lennox would have a hard time finding this place.
Frances Hodgson Burnett’s character, from the novel about a magical secret garden, would have had to travel seven floors above UTSC, through dim stairways, and sickly blue corridors, to even glimpse a hint.
The key to finding this elusive garden is good eyesight-little else would help you locate its only entrance. The word “greenhouse,” tacked to a door hidden around a dark corner that looks like it hides a utility closet, is your only clue.
Stepping through this door-easier than you would expect-gives you access to room S-702A, one of UTSC’s best kept secrets.
Unlike the unkempt and dying plants in Burnett’s fairy-tale garden, the three sections of the L-shaped, sunlit greenhouse on the roof of the Scarborough Campus’ S-Wing are home to a jungle of brilliant colours and wildly contorting plants.
“I love the cycads and the cacti,” said Mary Agoston, a middle-aged woman who stands at the entrance of the main greenhouse, clasping her hands together in front of a cactus with long white spikes. “Even though I wound up in emergency because of one of them.”
After getting blood poisoning from a near-invisible cactus spike, the greenhouse’s lone attendant-who came to this position after years working as a legal editor-has almost fully recovered.
“Now I use pliers on those…notice how I let them overgrow like that. I like the succulence of the cacti, and, experience not withstanding, I still do.”
For the last five years, Agoston has worked here three days a week, with tasks ranging from sweeping up dead leaves and digging up and repotting plants, to caring for a few plants used in undergraduate experiments.
“You’ve got to be self-motivated, really and truly you do,” she says.
Her greatest accomplishment is bringing the greenhouse out of the dreadful state she found it in, and bringing it to its current photogenic state without the use of pesticides.
“For a greenhouse this size, for the stuff that we’re doing, if you pay attention and you do the grunt work, there’s no need for them, absolutely no need,” Agoston said.
Hard work and (again) a good eye also seem to be the secret to maintaining this greenhouse.
Spying a group of green aphids a few metres away, Agoston quickly showers the tiny bugs with fizzy water from a bottle of insecticide nearby-a safer alternative to pesticides, she beams.
“She does great work,” said a UTSC carpenter visiting the greenhouse the check on a piece of incessantly banging sheet metal.
“Lots of people don’t know it’s here. We could probably be using it more for other courses, if people were aware of it,” said Agoston, reflecting on the greenhouse’s absence from the minds of virtually every UTSC student.
Why the brilliance of the vast collection of plants in the greenhouse doesn’t reflect what can be found-or not-around the suburban campus is not a question Agoston is prepared to answer.
But it is one that might deserve some digging.
