The garden and the balcony

The twenty-ninth entry is a estufa de jardim, glossed « the greenhouse », and that gloss is right — but it is one of four, and English chooses between them by what the building is for and who stands in it. « A greenhouse » is the ordinary domestic one, the frame of glass at the end of a garden, and it is the word this entry wants. « A glasshouse » is the commercial article, the acre of glass a nursery grows under, and it is what the trade and horticultural writing use. « A hothouse » is heated on purpose and held far above the outside air, which is why it went figurative: « a hothouse atmosphere » is one that forces things along too fast. « A conservatory » is not a growing house at all, but a glazed room built against the house and furnished for people to sit in. Portuguese asks none of this. A estufa covers the glass at the end of the garden and the acres of it at the nursery alike, and it is the sentence around the word, never the word itself, that says which one is standing there.