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Discover a Botanical Garden

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What is a botanical garden? It's not a zoo; a zoo is a collection of animals. It's not a museum; museums contain artifacts and displays, such as paintings or fossil animals, but doesn’t exhibit living things. A botanical garden is definitely a garden, but not like the kind of garden you or your family or your neighbours grow at home. Those gardens are usually for food or to make an attractive place to live. A botanical garden contains plants that help people learn more through observation, study and research.

For some people, a botanical garden can help them to learn about how plants grow or what plants grow best in certain conditions. For others, a botanical garden shows that there are many different kinds of plants. For scientists and researchers, a botanical garden is a place where they can make discoveries that better help us understand the natural world.

The botanical garden at the University of British Columbia was the first department on campus. Research and study into plants at UBC has been going on for almost one hundred years!

Are you interested in plants? You can discover over 8000 different kinds of plants from all over the world at UBC Botanical Garden. There are plants from China, South Africa, France, Japan, Chile, British Columbia and much more!

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Attention Adults!

Looking for activity ideas? Planning a visit? Check out our page for teachers and parents.

What's On Your Plate?

Every day, you eat something that comes from plants. But do you know how these plants are grown? Did you know there are special ways of growing these plants so that the fruit and vegetables grow especially big and tasty? Do you know how many kinds of plants we eat?

If you explore a vegetable farm, or an orchard, or UBC's Food Garden, you can learn about where the food on your dinner plate comes from and how it is grown. The UBC Food Garden is a special place to visit, because there are so many different kinds of fruits and vegetables in a small area - raspberries, brussel sprouts, apples, chard, peppers, strawberries and pumpkins to name only a few!