In Raymond Chandler's The Big Sleep, is the greenhouse at General Sternwood's home symbolic?

In the private detective mystery novel genre there is an
obligatory scene in which a client hires the detective to deal with a problem and
explains the details to him. A good example is in Dashiell Hammett's famous novel The
Maltese Falcon. Brigid O'Shaughnessy, calling herself Miss Wonderly, comes to the office
of Spade and Archer in San Francisco and tells Sam Spade a cock-and-bull story about how
she is trying to find her sister in order to get her away from Floyd Thursby and take
her back to New York.

Raymond Chandler had a much better
education than the typical pulp fiction writer, and he tried to improve on the
private-eye genre by giving it more variety, more subtlety, and more sophistication. The
writer he most admired was Henry James. In Chandler's introductory scene in  The Big
Sleep  he still had to have his detective meet a client and be told the details of the
problem before beginning to work on the assignment. But instead of having the client
come to the detective's office, Chandler has the detective go to the client's home. This
is understandable because the client, General Guy Sternwood, is an old man in extremely
bad health. By having Philip Marlowe meet the General in a greenhouse filled with
orchids, Chandler created an original kind of opening scene. It demonstrates the
General's wealth, which is the cause of his problems with his younger daughter, and his
feebleness due to his old age.The old man tells
Marlowe:

"You
are looking at a very dull survival of a rather gaudy life, a cripple paralyzed in both
legs and with only half of his lower belly. There's very little that I can eat and my
sleep is so close to waking that it is hardly worth the
name."

The setting shows the
client's wealth and also helps set the exotic tone of a mystery that will be played out
in gaudy, glamorous, and kinky Southern California. It also allows Marlowe to meet
Norris the butler and both of General Sternwood's daughters, and even to catch a glimpse
of Owen Taylor the chauffeur who will shortly be shooting Arthur Gwynn Geiger while the
dealer in pornographic books is photographing the nymphomaniac Carmen Sternwood in the
nude. In addition to meeting four of the principal characters, Marlowe will notice two
of the automobiles that will figure prominently in the story. These are a Packard
convertible and a big Buick sedan, both of which are being wiped down by Owen
Taylor.

So the opening of  The Big
Sleep  in a greenhouse filled with orchids is colorful and original, while
enabling the private eye to learn a great deal more than just the bare-bones details of
his assignment. Chandler is following a principle he learned from Henry James, which is
to "dramatize, dramatize, dramatize." Show, don't tell! Instead of being told a story by
a client sitting on the other side of the desk in his office, Marlowe is able to visit
the scene and interact with the most important characters. Not only that, but the
opening allows the reader to see Marlowe in action and not just sitting in a swivel
chair and listening to somebody talk.