The Girl With a Thousand Christmas Trees

by Jen Hirt

Introduction: Glass Always Breaks

On my 30^th birthday, I had the blueprint of a greenhouse tattooed on my left bicep. Young men loitering in the tattoo parlor wondered what the straight lines and strong angles of beams were all about. I explained: the blueprint was a Dutch “winter garden” designed in 1737 by Pieter de la Court van de Voort. The simple schematic showed a one-room greenhouse with a loft for retaining warmth, a glass wall oriented south, and stepped benches so the four potted citrus trees had ample sun—cutting-edge architecture, not surprising for the early years of the Enlightenment.

“Cool,” said one guy, “you must be Dutch.”

“No,” I said. “I’m greenhouse.”

The guy nodded, but he looked confused. He wandered off. I’d have to come up with a better explanation.

I’m greenhouse? I am. My ancestry, my bloodline, my memories, my identity. Hirt’s Greenhouse in Ohio, to be exact. Four generations of my family worked there from 1915 to 2005. In 1915, my great-grandpa Sam Hirt bought the land and built one small greenhouse. In 2005, my dad sold the land and 14 old greenhouses for $2.5 million to developers holding blueprints for an entirely different building, a CVS pharmacy. My dad wanted the money; the corporation wanted the location—in the center of town at the corner of a major intersection. My brother, next in line to run the business, hoped some of the sale money would allow him to continue the business elsewhere, and it did. Today, the latest incarnation of our family business thrives under new greenhouses.

But on the day I got tattooed, no one knew for sure what would happen to the family business. All we knew for sure was that the greenhouses would be demolished. A corporate pharmacy had no use for them.

The uncertainty spread to my immediate family. My mom was ill with multiple sclerosis, diagnosed in 1996. My dad had left her in a brutal divorce after 30 years of marriage. Their relationship, once a cornerstone of the family business, had demolished itself in 2000, and no one had bothered to clear the rubble. Because of the divorce, no one was really surprised by the sale of Hirt’s Greenhouse. Saddened, yes, but surprised? No. We’d all grown jaded by then. In fact, we wondered why it hadn’t happened sooner.

 I’d decided on the tattoo in February 2005, a few months before the demolition, when I knew the sale was pending. It was a bittersweet time. I was a writer fueled by the memories of a childhood spent under glass, so I hated to see the old greenhouses come down. On the other hand, the financial windfall might allow my brother and dad to sustain the family business on new land, with modern, heat-efficient greenhouses designed for their burgeoning online sales. The family no longer needed huge greenhouses open to the public for holidays and planting seasons. Internet shoppers could imagine whatever greenhouse they liked. Whatever jungle, whatever season, whatever glass. Whatever.

But I couldn’t haul out my Generation X whatever. Internet shoppers didn’t need a real glass greenhouse, but I did.

My brother, on the other hand, shrugged off sentiment effortlessly. The eve of the official sale was the eve of his twenty-eighth birthday. He downed a shot of liquor at a bar, called me, and said he felt like Cortez burning his ships—nowhere to go but forward, onward, bravely. My tattoo healed with the salve of my brother’s wild enthusiasm. How unexpected.

So the greenhouses built over four generations were demolished in one week in June 2005. From my apartment in Idaho, where I’d been living since graduate school, I stared at demolition photos my dad sent in email attachments. Jutting angles of snapped frames, wooden and metal, crusted with white lead paint. Wires and insulation from the offices. Slabs of concrete. Piles of glass from the 90-year-old greenhouse, the 65-year old greenhouses, and the 11 others I’d played in as a child. Broken, dismantled, heaped. Gone. I stared at the photos, zoomed in, zoomed out. They weren’t violent, but post-violent. I cuffed my hand over my tattoo, those dark lines of ultimate permanence. My greenhouses were gone.

Greenhouse history celebrates the ingenuity behind advances, like the loft and benches in my tattoo. Even more history notes their demise, because if greenhouses do anything, they fall apart. Fragile glass always breaks. It’s a law and a doctrine and a prediction and an apology. For example, the fierce British winter of 1739 vanquished the greenhouse at Beddington, a famous orangery. World War I drained the workers and coal from The Great Conservatory at Chatsworth, England, and all the plants died. A smoldering cigarette leveled the Crystal Palace in 1936, and Londoners saw the spectacular pyre in the distance. Glass always breaks. Still, I expected my greenhouses to last forever. They were a constant for my first thirty years. Their absence became a blueprint I never considered.

Until I started considering that absence, that is. I’ve spent the greater part of my adult years writing about it, about glass and light and metaphors, about privilege and redemption, about trying to figure out what it means to be the fourth generation of something that almost ended. The result of that writing is twelve essays, each on a theme, not at all chronological, each a line in a larger blueprint, a less permanent tattoo.

Why the tattoo? So I can carry my four generations and my four immediate family members as images of four trees that are perpetually thriving in the perfect location. So forces beyond my control will stop taking away my foundations. So I can stake my own claim to a place. Mostly, I just like the idea of a tattooed blueprint, a permanent plan for the future. In the simple lines of instruction and geometry, both Pieter de la Court van de Voort and I see an expectation of a time to come. We both know that this is where the sun will slant, and here the plants will thrive.

When strangers ask about my tattoo, I explain its history and my history, but I never get to the sentence about the greenhouse being gone, that all-important merger of its history with my history. What are the right words for that loss?

These twelve essays might be the right words, a stroll through the final seven years or so of Hirt’s Greenhouse. The first step: December 2000, when I realize what’s going on. The final stride: December 2007 with a chance encounter on my grandparents’ former land that makes me realize I do know how to let the greenhouses go. My essays are sides in a prism; the words, light refracted.

Born and raised in the small town of Valley City, Ohio, Jen Hirt grew up as part of the fourth generation of family to know the fabulous old glasshouses of Hirt’s Greenhouse in Strongsville, Ohio. The events leading up to the demolition of the greenhouses are told in her first book, Under Glass: The Girl with a Thousand Christmas Trees. Jen’s creative nonfiction has been published in literary journals such as The Gettysburg Review, Natural Bridge, Redivider, Flyway, The King’s English, Ohioana Quarterly, and The Heartlands Today. Her work has won grants from the Pennsylvania Council on the Arts, the Ohioana Library, and Bernheim Arboretum, where she was the 2004 writer-in-residence. She is an alum of Hiram College, Iowa State University, and the University of Idaho. Jen teaches writing at Penn State Harrisburg. She lives in Harrisburg, Pennsylvania with the writer Paul Cockeram and their fab lab, Olly. Hirt is in town May 15—she’ll be signing copies at the town square gazebo in Strongsville from 1-4 p.m.