Year-Round Beauty
All year round, the UBC Botanical Gardens provide flourishes of colour and pockets of botanical variety. In December and January some winter plants flower, but the best time to visit the gardens is usually in spring - around April and May. Rhododendrons, magnolias and ephemerals all bloom during the late spring. In the summer, the heat usually brings on a flourish of bright colours to the Alpine Garden.

Many Gardens, Many Volunteers
The UBC Botanical Gardens are split into many different sections. While a walk through the gardens can be done in an hour or so, staff and volunteers urge visitors to allot more time for their visit in order to thoroughly enjoy the striking array of varieties and colours. The Botanical Gardens include: the Alpine Garden, Food Garden, Asian Garden, Native Plant Garden, and Physic and Nitobe Japanese Garden. The David C. Lam Asian Garden is home to plants from Tibet, Japan, China, Korea, Manchuria and other regions. This is the greatest collection of magnolias on the continent and also one of North America’s largest collections of rhododendrons. The Alpine Garden houses varieties from a vast array of areas from the Andes to Morocco, and Asia Minor to the Canary Islands. If all of this seems a bit overwhelming, book a guided group tour (available from March to October) and a friendly and knowledgeable expert will walk you through the greenery. Special events at the gardens include: the Apple Festival in October, holiday wreath sales in late November/early December and Christmas tree chipping services in early January.

Take the Garden Home
And if a walk through this beautiful landscape has inspired a green-thumb, stop by the garden and plant centre. Here you’ll find all you need to fill your backyard with foliage and flowers. You can purchase gardening and botanical books, gardening tools and accessories, gifts, dried flower arrangements, seeds, perennials, annuals, shrubs and vines.