A 50-year-old ficus named Rubi. A rhododendron taxifolium from the Philippines, now extinct in the wild. The world’s second largest living wall.
I have come to Amazon’s urban campus in Seattle to meet Beth Galetti, the company’s senior VP of human resources. But instead of ushering me directly into a conference room, she offers me a guided tour of the Spheres, the three conjoined geodesic domes–containing 40,000 plants, inviting seating areas, and good coffee–that Amazon opened last year on a former parking lot in the Denny Triangle neighborhood.
Part botanical wonderland and part work space, the glass-encased Spheres are designed to let the thousands of Amazon staffers who toil in nearby buildings get away from it all without having to walk more than a few blocks from their desks. “We wanted to give our employees a place to experience nature,” explains Galetti, who is wearing a puffy winter jacket and floral scarf and is clearly having fun playing forest ranger. “When you’re in a typical office environment, the best you might get is a plant.”
The Spheres’ Edenesque splendor seems all the more striking after Galetti and I make the five-minute trek to the anodyne tower where she works. By the standards of enormous tech companies, her surroundings are willfully mundane, reflecting Amazon’s long-standing stance that it should be investing above all in delighting customers rather than its own creature comforts: “It sets the tone for our frugality,” she says. Her office is tiny–three visitors would constitute a crowd–and sports few accoutrements other than a standing desk and the requisite shelf of family photos. (In one, Galetti poses with her beaming dad during an Amazon “Bring Your Parents to Work” day.)
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