Amazon greenhouse to house rare plants

For the next two years, most of the UW’s collection of 3,400 specimens of plants — 9,000 in all — are moving into a Redmond greenhouse once owned by Molbak’s and now offered to the university for free by Amazon.

Amazon has greenhouses in Redmond because it’s building a collection of plants to live in its glass-and-steel spheres taking shape in downtown Seattle. And the UW is building a new, 20,000-square-foot greenhouse as part of its $165 million Life Sciences Building, a five-story, glass-and-steel structure that will go up alongside the Burke-Gilman Trail.

The plants, which live in the 67-year-old Botany Greenhouse, must move because the greenhouse will be razed this summer to make way for the new building.

With room, apparently, to spare, Amazon offered the UW free use of a Redmond greenhouse, an in-kind contribution worth more than $200,000, the company says. About 1,000 of the plants will be housed in the UW’s Center for Urban Horticulture.

“It was a meeting of minds of plant-oriented people,” said Toby Bradshaw, chair of the Biology Department. Ron Gagliardo, Amazon’s horticulturist, helped arrange the deal that gives the UW free greenhouse space, he said. And Amazon will get some benefit from the arrangement — it will be able to propagate some of the UW’s unique and rare species to grow in its spheres.

Read more at The Seattle Times