VanDusen Botanical Garden, Botanical garden in Vancouver, Canada
VanDusen Botanical Garden covers 22 hectares at the northwest corner of 37th Avenue and Oak Street in Shaughnessy, Vancouver. Its rolling landscape holds a Sino-Himalayan garden of about eight acres, a Japanese garden, carved totem poles, large stone sculptures, a cypress pond renamed Roy Forster Pond, and a maze beside the heirloom vegetable garden.
In 1970 the Vancouver Foundation, the provincial government and the City of Vancouver agreed to fund a public garden on part of the old Shaughnessy Golf Course. It opened on 30 August 1975 and is jointly run by the Vancouver Park Board and the Vancouver Botanical Gardens Association. R. Roy Forster, awarded the Order of Canada in 1999 for designing the gardens and their collections, continued earlier landscape work by Bill Livingston of the Park Board; Cypress Pond was renamed Roy Forster Pond in his honour.
The garden is named for lumberman and philanthropist Whitford Julian VanDusen. From April through October, trained volunteer guides explain the plant collection and garden history on foot and in motorized golf carts. Volunteers also collect, clean and package seeds for sale, and staff a large plant sale each spring.
The garden lies at the northwest corner of 37th Avenue and Oak Street in Shaughnessy and is open every day of the year except Christmas. Volunteer guides lead walks and golf-cart tours from April through October. The Visitor Centre holds the shop, library, restaurant and coffee shop.
An Elizabethan hedge maze built from 3,000 pyramidal cedars forms the only classical hedge maze in Vancouver. Visitors can lose themselves among the closely grown hedges that shape into a green puzzle.
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