Denver Botanic Gardens

Twenty Four Acres At York Street, Among The Most Visited Botanical Gardens In The United States. Holds What Is Generally Reckoned The Finest Collection Of Steppe Plants In The World, Assembled Because Denver Itself Sits In A Steppe Climate. · Denver, Colorado

Denver Botanic Gardens is twenty-four acres behind a wall on York Street, and its distinction is an unglamorous one that it has made into the best thing about it. Denver sits in a steppe climate - cold, dry, high, continental - which is shared by only three other regions on earth, in Central Asia, Patagonia and South Africa. Rather than fight that with lawns and thirsty borders, the Gardens went and collected from all four steppes, and the result is generally reckoned the finest steppe collection anywhere. Around it sit a Japanese garden of a hundred and thirty sculpted pines, a 1966 concrete-and-plexiglass tropical conservatory that is a landmark of its own, an alpine rock garden, and a children's garden built up a hillside. In summer the lawn becomes a concert venue; in winter the whole place is lit for Blossoms of Light. What makes the steppe collection more than a curiosity is that it is also a demonstration - everything in it survives a Denver summer without watering, which is the most practical exhibit in the city.

1007 York Street, Denver, Colorado, 80206, United States

Open daily year-round during daytime hours, with extended evening hours for summer concerts and for the winter light display. TIMED-ENTRY TICKETS ARE THE NORM here and the evening events sell out well ahead. The separate Chatfield Farms site south-west of the city keeps its own hours and has its own admission. Parking is in an on-site garage that fills at weekends; there is limited permitted street parking in the surrounding residential blocks.

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