GREENHOUSE GARDEN

A collection of house plants led to a full greenhouse in this Virginia backyard.

A collection of house plants led to a full greenhouse in this Virginia backyard.

Sometimes, a simple hobby can turn into a full-blown passion.

This was the case for wedding photographer Megan Vaughan, who didn’t originally set out to build a greenhouse. At first, she was just trying to keep a few plants in her home alive.

SMALL BEGINNINGS

“I never, ever had a green thumb,” Megan says of her gardening expertise. She’d never had plants when she was younger and had no idea how to care for them. But after she and her husband suffered a miscarriage, she began keeping a few plants around the house for therapeutic purposes. Beginning with a pot of daffodils a friend bought for her, Megan’s green and growing collection ballooned from a few small pots to hundreds of different plants.

Eventually she realized she wanted a greenhouse on her property, and after getting her engineering husband on board, the two began the slow process of construction.

BUILDER BASICS

Megan’s husband built the whole building himself, despite having no professional building experience. Construction took seven months, and the greenhouse was officially finished two years ago. It’s made mostly of cedar, and the refurbished windows throughout the structure had to be a specific size to fit between the cedar beams. Finding them was a process that Megan says took months. “We made several changes to the design in the building process,” she says, “but because we were the ones doing it, it was easy—we could just decide to change it up.”

The structure was built without a foundation. They chose the spot for it by watching the light in the yard for a long time to figure out the greenhouse’s optimal position. They had originally intended the greenhouse to have a grass floor, so sod was put in, but it began to die soon after. Finally, the two took out all the remaining grass, leveled the ground, set in flagstones and then pieced moss by hand between all the stones. The results are stunning.

“A lot of people think the greenhouse was built for photo shoots, but it was a healing process,” she says. The couple kept the structure to themselves for a full year, but after that they began to open it up more. Many have even asked Megan if they can be married in the greenhouse, though she insists it was never built with that intention. For weddings, space is at a premium, as the structure only fits about twenty chairs. “Sometimes people even ask if they can just come take a nap in it,” Megan says.

(top, left) Sometimes people ask Megan if they can just come and take a nap inside this stunning greenhouse. (top, middle) The process of deciding what plants to keep in the greenhouse was a matter of trial, error and experimentation. Often the decision of whether to keep a plant inside or outside rested on whether deer were likely to eat it. (opposite) Megan’s full collection of plants numbers in the hundreds and stretches throughout her greenhouse, garden and the inside of the home itself.

(top, left) The greenhouse was made mostly of cedar using refurbished windows; the building process took seven months to complete. (top, right) While the greenhouse originally had grass floors, Megan and her husband replaced them with stone and moss after the grass began to die. (bottom) The greenhouse has varieties of ferns, rubber tree plants, seasonal flowers and more.