Niagara Parks Botanical Gardens: A Little Bit of Europe in Niagara Falls
The Niagara Parks Botanical Gardens is one of those places that is just pretty. The kind of pretty that makes you want to wander a little slower, take far too many photos and pretend, just for a minute, that you’ve somehow ended up somewhere in Europe.
Tucked along the Niagara Parkway, just a short drive north of the Falls, the gardens feel like their own little world. There are flowers everywhere, winding stone pathways, enormous old trees and quiet little corners that seem made for stopping and looking around. It is one of those places where you don’t really need a plan. You just pick a path and see where it takes you.
And there is quite a bit of history here too.
The Botanical Gardens were established in 1936, the same year the Niagara Parks School of Horticulture began as the Training School for Apprentice Gardeners. Today, the 99-acre gardens are still a living classroom for horticulture students, who help design and care for many of the beautiful displays throughout the grounds.
One of my favourite little discoveries is the sweet stone house tucked away among the gardens, with greenery climbing across parts of its walls and giving it that slightly hidden, old-world cottage feeling. It is called The Bothy.
“Bothy” is a traditional Scottish term for a small, simple hut or cottage, often used as accommodation for farm workers or as basic shelter. In this case, it became a fitting name for the student residence at the School of Horticulture.
The east wing of The Bothy incorporates the original Murray farmhouse, connected to the Murray family, who owned the property beginning in the 1870s. When the School of Horticulture was being developed, matching stone wings were added to the original farmhouse in 1938 and 1939 to create dormitory space for students.
So that charming little building covered in greenery isn’t simply there to look pretty. It is actually a piece of the property’s earlier history that was incorporated into the school and is still part of the gardens today.
My favourite tree-lined path is the Hornbeam Allée, a beautiful walkway where the hornbeam trees create a long, almost enclosed corridor above the stone path. There is something about it that reminds me of Italy.
Maybe it is the symmetry of the trees, the stone beneath your feet or the way the light filters through the canopy, but the scene in the movie Gladiator comes to mind of Maximus walking through the countryside as he imagines returning home.
I see those tree-lined paths and immediately get that same peaceful, romantic feeling.
It’s definitely one of those places where you stop for a photograph.
Of course, the flowers are the real stars of the Botanical Gardens. The Rose Garden has been part of the gardens since the 1940s and contains more than 2,400 roses spread throughout 54 rose beds. There are also perennial borders, a Woodland Garden, a Shade Garden and a wonderful Herb Garden with more than 500 herbs grouped according to their traditional uses.
The Crabapple Vista is especially beautiful in spring, when the flowering trees turn one of the garden’s stately avenues into a tunnel of blossoms. Come back later in the summer and completely different parts of the gardens have taken over.
That is part of the fun. You could visit in May, return in July and come back again in September, and it would never feel quite like the same garden.
The Butterfly Conservatory may be the best-known attraction on the property, but I think the gardens around it deserve just as much time. Because the nicest part about the Niagara Parks Botanical Gardens is that nothing here really needs to be rushed.
You can wander beneath the hornbeam trees, discover a little stone farmhouse hiding beneath the greenery, follow a pathway simply because it looks pretty, stop to smell the roses or take twenty pictures of the same little corner because the light is just right.
And sometimes, those are my favourite kinds of places. The ones where there is nothing you have to do. You just get to be there. ||
