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Travel the World
There are more than 8000 different plants at the UBC Botanical Garden, so when you walk around the garden it's like taking a walk around the world. Here are some highlights from the garden:
Asian Garden
The David C. Lam Asian Garden is home to thousands of plants from countries such as China, Japan, Tibet and Korea. Carefully nestled in amongst plants of the BC native coastal forest, Asian plants look right at home in this landscape.
Alpine Garden
The E.H. Lohbrunner Alpine Garden is divided up into different continental regions, with each continental unit displaying species from the mountains and alpine areas of that part of the world:
Learn More About the Alpine Garden
Winter Garden
This garden is a collection of plants that show off their best when most other plants are leafless or dormant (sleeping). Some of these special plants bloom in the middle of winter, such as yellow jasmine and winter honeysuckle (which smells of lemons), but others are planted in this garden because of their brightly coloured berries or interesting bark.
Food Garden
Food is something that everybody likes, and this garden is a favourite for kids. There are permanent crops, like apple trees and blueberry bushes, and vegetables that need to be planted every year, like lettuce and carrots and tomatoes. Most kids recognize those crops, but there are lots of edible plants that maybe aren't so familiar, such as globe artichokes, which look like giant thistles, and swiss chard, with its bright, rainbow-coloured stems. You can find gooseberries (which don’t look anything like geese), Chinese gooseberries (which aren't even real gooseberries), figs, quinces, hazelnuts, asparagus, horse-radish, rat-tail radish and more in this garden. All around the Food Garden are specially trained apples and pears and plum trees, some shaped to form low or tall fences, while others are formed into fans or cups or the letters of the alphabet.
Arbour Garden
Climbing vines make the arbour like a garden in a tunnel. A massive wooden trellis supports climbing plants such as wisteria, clematis and bittersweet.
Physic Garden
This garden grows plants used for medicines from hundreds of years ago. You can also find herbs you might recognized such as rosemary, sage, and thyme. All traditional cultures have a history of using plants. Just like the local First Nations cultures, they include a wide range of uses besides providing food. Some plant uses are based on superstition. In the area around the Mediterranean Sea, it was once popular to plant Sempervivum tectorum (houseleek) plants on slate roofs to protect them being struck by lightning. The discovery of plants that can relieve pain, heal wounds, cure sickness or cause sickness (or even death) has had a powerful effect on all cultures. In Europe, medicinal plants were often grown by monks in special gardens called physic gardens. The UBC Physic Garden has many plants that were valued during the Renaissance for their role in medicine. Unfortunately, one widely held belief at the time was that if the shape of a plant part resembled a part of the human body, it was a sure sign that God placed it on Earth to be used as a cure for diseases of that body part. For example, the herb called lungwort, whose leaves resemble the inside of a human lung, were thought to cure breathing problems. We now know that such beliefs are completely wrong.
Native Garden
This garden is home to many types of plants and trees that are native to British Columbia. You can jump over stepping stones in a pond to look for frogs, insects and birds. Do you recognize plants you might see in BC?
Learn More About the Native Garden