The Greenhouse Preserving Los Angeles’ Botanical Histories

Tucked away in a converted truck-loading bay in Los Angeles’ Glassell Park, Geoponika is an experimental greenhouse and landscape design studio founded by Carlos Campos Morera and Max Martin, the duo behind the pioneering plant collective Cactus Store.

Spanning 2,000 square feet, the space, affectionately referred to by Morera as a “plant orphanage”, houses an extraordinary collection of more than 10,000 plants. Over the past 15 years, Morera and Martin have inherited collections from aging growers and institutions undergoing generational change, dedicating themselves to preserving and cultivating these specimens. The collection functions as a living archive that represents an ongoing commitment to botanical preservation and education.

The greenhouse itself is a testament to urban transformation, showing how a former industrial site can be repurposed into a thriving ecological enclave. At first glance, the collection seems wild and unstructured with a breathtaking abundance of plants stacked in a dense, organic tapestry. But there is unique harmony beneath the apparent randomness. Multi-layered shelves are crowded with plants, each creating its own microclimate. Overgrown branches cast shifting shadows while stacked wood beneath the pots collects moisture, forming humid pockets within the greenhouse. In every square foot, nearly as many microclimates as plants coexist.

Geoponika—named in Architectural Digest’s AD100 2025—draws inspiration directly from this living collection. Its work treats gardens as evolving ecologies, guided by the same ethic of stewardship that animates its nonprofit, Nonhuman Teachers, which fosters new forms of ecological storytelling. Together, these projects form a broader experiment in coexistence: an exploration of how design and wildness can thrive side by side in the contemporary urban landscape.