Montreal Botanical Garden

We went to the Montreal Botanical Garden expecting a pleasant hour among the flowerbeds and stayed most of the day, which seems to be the standard experience for anyone who underestimates the size of the place — over 75 hectares and roughly ten thousand plant species, making it one of the largest botanical gardens on earth, tucked in beside the Olympic Stadium as though the two attractions had simply agreed to share a neighbourhood. The Chinese Garden, Jardin de Chine, was the one that stopped us longest: built in the 1990s with pavilions, rockwork, and artisans brought in directly from Shanghai, it’s modelled on the private gardens of the Ming dynasty and feels, walking through its covered walkways beside the still ponds, entirely transported rather than merely themed.

We came back a second time in September specifically for the Magic of Lanterns festival, when the Chinese Garden fills with enormous illuminated lantern sculptures — dragons, pagodas, entire mythological scenes rendered in silk and wire and LED — and the whole garden takes on a completely different character after dark, families and couples and groups of teenagers all wandering the same paths under the glow. Lia, who is generally unmoved by festival lighting displays on principle, admitted this one got her, particularly a sculpture of cranes mid-flight that seemed to be lit from within rather than lit up.

The Japanese Garden next door, quieter and more austere, felt like a deliberate palate cleanser after the Chinese Garden’s theatricality — raked gravel, a single perfect maple, a teahouse where we sat for twenty minutes doing absolutely nothing, which is exactly what the space seems designed to demand of you. The First Nations Garden further along traces the plant knowledge and land relationships of Quebec’s Indigenous nations, and reading the interpretive panels there, after the imported spectacle of the other gardens, felt like the most honest and rooted part of the whole visit.

The greenhouses, ten interconnected pavilions holding everything from desert cacti to a full tropical rainforest canopy, are worth the visit alone on a grey Montreal winter day — we ducked in during a February cold snap and left an hour later in actual sweat, which after a week of subzero temperatures felt like a genuine gift.

When to go: Late June through September for the outdoor gardens at their fullest, and specifically September for the Magic of Lanterns festival in the Chinese Garden. The greenhouses are a warm refuge worth visiting any time in winter.