Discovering cities’ many hidden treasures
We are big advocates for checking out gardens while visiting other cities.
Celebrity gardens — such as Kew Gardens in London, or the Brooklyn Botanic Garden in New York — are always astonishing. We have stumbled upon lesser-known gardens that provoked unexpected awe. The surprise discovery of a unique garden always helps makes a trip memorable. A few that come to mind: Las Vegas: A few years ago, while attending a conference in Vegas, Mark googled “botanical garden Las Vegas.” He was desperate, done with the Strip’s lights and noise and sick of the smoky, air-conditioned atmosphere in the casinos.
That’s how he found the Botanical Garden at Springs Preserve. Who would imagine that the “City of Lights” is home to the largest collection of Mojave Desert cacti and succulent plants, dispersed over 110 acres of show gardens, hiking paths and naturalized feature gardens. This oasis is a welcome and unexpected respite from Vegas’s sprawling convention centres, hotels and unnatural architecture.
Most visitors to Vegas don’t realize the city has a botanical garden. After four return visits, Mark is impressed by the four outdoor amphitheatres, the butterfly conservatory, the excellent restaurant and gift shop and many opportunities to learn about the flora and fauna of the southwest American desert. Berlin: Last fall, Ben had a similarly unanticipated but uplifting experience while pursuing some Cold War history. Standing at a site along the former Berlin Wall, he happened upon “The Treehouse on the Wall.” After the socialist state of the German Democratic Republic — East Germany — separated from the west in 1961 with the Berlin Wall, it left a forgotten a scrap of land on the west side of the guarded concrete barrier.
Beginning in 1982, West German resident Osman Kalin started clear- ing the land on the sliver of real estate and established a vegetable garden. It is said that when Kalin was confronted by East German guards, he made peace by offering them vegetables from the allotment. When his sunflowers started reaching up to peer above the wall, he decided to build the Treehouse, which still stands today.
Osman no longer maintains the garden at the base of his tree house, but neighbours carry on his tradition even now that the Wall has been gone for 28 years. While this small garden plot is a far cry from Europe’s manicured botanical and estate gardens, it is a worthy stop — and lesson — about the communitybuilding power of a garden. It is more significant for what it stands for than its physical features. Meanwhile, back in Toronto ... there are unexpected gardens, in hidden corners that knit together communities across the city. Thorogood Community Garden is one such place in Toronto’s east-end Riverside neighbourhood. Named for the long-time residents of Allen Ave. (where the garden is located), the compact garden is tucked away on a former residential lot where community members have been maintaining and funding it through grassroots efforts since the 1980s.
Today, the garden is not just a community focal point, but also a gathering place for pollinators. It features native and blooming plants that are intended to attract bees.
Another Toronto garden we love is the Rosetta McClain Gardens atop the Scarborough Bluffs. Rosetta and her husband, Robert Watson (Wat) McClain, built the garden on a parcel of farmland inherited from her father. After her death, Wat donated the property to the city of Toronto in his wife’s memory. The beauty of their shared passion for gardening is still spectacular; the garden is free to visit.
For us, this garden has special meaning thanks to a photo of Len Cullen — dad and grandfather — standing next to a bird bath he had built. It was one of his first commercial landscape jobs in the 1940s, with business partner John Weall. You can understand why this garden is a personal favourite of ours.
Getting to the root of a place and tapping into its history is always a rewarding part of travel. And what we’ve found is that gardens can tell interesting stories about the communities where they grow. Mark Cullen is an expert gardener, author, broadcaster, tree advocate and holds the Order of Canada. His son Ben is a fourth-generation urban gardener and graduate of University of Guelph and Dalhousie University in Halifax. Follow them at markcullen.com, @markcullengardening, on Facebook and bi-weekly on Global TV’s Morning Show.