There is a place in the city, a place where the ceiling is clear and the floor is green. Beyond the bustle of Dundas and Queen, set back from a road full of cabs and pedestrians, there is a building set aside for nature. The glass doors of the Allan Gardens Conservatory are left perpetually open, ready and waiting for the casual passerby, the eager botanist, or the chilled city-dweller searching for some tropical warmth. Inside, the heat creeps over her skin and she looks up, seeing a tangle of leaves held stark against the blue of the distant sky.
She weaves her way through the foliage with a rustle of fabric and a sigh of contentment; she pauses by a mound of cacti, stops at a pond brimming with turtles. There is a bed of orchids here, a flock of palm trees there. It is quiet. It is humid. Above, the building arches over it all, a glass and wood and brick nest housing a cluster of the exotic and the colourful and the growing. There is a place in the city, a place for a snatched half hour of paradise.
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