Hendrie Park

Surrounded by the ever-changing blooms of Hendrie Park, the tea house offers the ideal spot to relax in nature’s tranquility while enjoying afternoon tea or lunch.

In 2013 Dan Lawrie, Hamilton businessman and Burlington resident, made a 10-year commitment to donating sculpture to Royal Botanical Gardens which has created The International Sculpture Collection.

Through Dan’s generosity, this permanent collection grows in Hendrie Park each year, with the addition of new works from around the world.

The new Rose Garden features a spectacular display of roses and companion plants intended to extend seasonal interest and keep diseases at bay. Our focus is on disease resistant, disease-tolerant and cold-hardy roses, including Canadian introductions. We’re excited to present an innovative, sustainable and inspiring experience, the quintessential rose garden for Canada’s largest botanical garden.

Characterized by the tall Bloodroot (Karl Unnasch) sculpture in the center, ‘Global Garden’, will become the new home of the iris collection.  

Surrounding the South end of Scented Garden, the Hendrie Park Gates were constructed in recognition of the Hendrie family, who previously owned the lands on which the garden now sits. The gates are a favourite of visitors looking for an iconic spot for a photo op.

Bounded on three sides by the natural lands of the Grindstone Creek Valley, this garden features native trees, shrubs, perennials and grasses along with their cultivars to add extra colour. Over 135 native species are displayed in plant community zones that represent several local habitats including prairie, oak savannah, Carolinian forest and wetland pond.

The Helen M. Kippax Wild Plant Garden was opened in 2008 thanks to the generosity of Mary Stedman and her late sisters Margaret and Ruth to celebrate their aunt, Helen M. Kippax, one of the founding members of the Canadian Society for Landscape Architecture. The garden was designed to display how native plants bring beauty, ecological function, biodiversity and sustainability to gardens. In the context of this garden, Royal Botanical Gardens defines a native species as one that was present in Ontario prior to the arrival of European colonists in the 18th century.

The garden was originally designed by Martin Wade Landscape Architects in consultation with native plant gardening advocate and author, Lorraine Johnson.

Life on the forest floor is a challenge. Intense spring sun is followed by deep summer shade. Around the temperate world, Europe, Japan, and here in southern Ontario, plants adapt in similar ways. Many forest species compress their peak growth and bloom into the short period after spring thaw and before tree leaves block the sun. Later, only shade-tolerant plants (those that can photosynthesize in low light) will thrive.

Never take your native woodlanders for granted. Plants such as Trillium are highly desirable and sought- after plants in places beyond Canada. Sometimes plants such as these become so coveted that plant collectors take them from wild, seriously reducing and threatening native plant populations. Knowing the origin of the plants you buy for your garden is very important.

To extend the seasonal interest of this garden, other shade-tolerant plants from the world’s temperate forests are included to display the diversity of plants adapted to shade conditions.

A memorial donation by the family of Hamilton physician and surgeon Dr. Roy Edward Morrison assists in the development and maintenance of this garden.

Veggie Village is a display garden showcasing the many ways in which you can grow vegetables at home. The garden consists of nine vegetable demonstration plots as well as an interpretive zone where visitors can learn why and how we should all be eating and growing our own local produce.

Explore the connections between people and healing plants from around the world, from traditional remedies to leading-edge drugs in the Healing Garden. Our collection of medicinal plants has undergone a full metamorphosis, and the space has been reconfigured and enlarged, expanding display room.

Discover how plants heal us and give life through this in-depth look into each plant’s role in supporting wellness and understand why 80% of the world’s medicines have their ‘roots’ in plants. Each of the 12 garden beds focuses on different plants that are used to treat ailments in specific bodily systems. Learn about the healing power of plants from head to toe!

An avenue of Chinese Flowering Dogwood (Cornus kousa) leads you to the Scented Garden, with its traditional stone walls, gravel paths, boxwood edging, and cooling central fountain.

Plant scents can be penetrating or elusive and subtle but touch our lives in many ways. They not only arouse our memory—lilacs are the essence of spring, and fresh-mown hay means the height of summer—but we have long used plants to add fragrance to ourselves and our homes.

Scented plants are often used commercially in the production of perfumes and fragrances. The fragrance produced by some plants is extremely complex. Take lilacs for example. The fragrance is made up of 185 different compounds. As a result, essential oils from lilac flowers are too intricate to reproduce so lilac perfume in cosmetics is derived from extracts of non-related flowers.

The scents and fragrances produced by plants aren’t just for our pleasure alone. Some plants rely on wind or gravity for pollination, but many rely on scent. The fragrance of the flower alerts pollinators such as insects, bats and hummingbirds that the plant is ready to be pollinated. When the animals arrive to collect pollen or nectar the pollen gets transferred. As a result, plants and pollinators often display a long history of mutual evolution.

The Scented Garden explores the range of scents through annuals, perennials and shrubs that produce scented flowers as well as scented, “scratch and sniff” leaves.

The White Garden celebrates plants…in monochrome! This garden features plants with white flowers, berries, foliage or bark. The central grass area provides a tranquil venue for relaxing, enjoying the beauty around you and if you time it right, listening to live music in the garden.

Each summer we partner with University of Guelph to trial (“try out”) new cultivated varieties of annuals. The Plant Agriculture Department receives seed from plant breeders and produces seedlings which are distributed to several sites across southern Ontario. These are planted and as they grow and are evaluated to see how they perform in our climate and soils.

Go back in time with this planting of living fossils. This grove features plants that were once thought to be extinct but have since been re-discovered and brought into cultivation. This planting showcases Metasequoia (Dawn Redwood), Ginkgo (Ginkgo) and Sciadopitys (Japanese Umbrella-pine) species and their cultivars.

This garden features plants of ethnobotanical value used in medieval times for medicinal, culinary, aromatic and dye purposes. These plants predate the many modern synthetic products we use today and were essential to survival in medieval times. The medieval garden is truly a garden of sustainability and human resilience.

This garden features an analemmatic sundial (the visitor becomes the gnomon and casts the shadow).

The sundial was designed and built with assistance of Dr. Paul Lapp.