The Atlanta Botanical Garden is a 30-acre (12 ha) botanical garden located adjacent to Piedmont Park in downtown Atlanta, Georgia, USA. The mission of the garden, founded in 1976, is “to develop and maintain collections of plants for display, education, conservation, research, and enjoyment.”
The Green Expansion Plan was a major expansion project completed in the spring of 2010 that doubled the size of the garden while modernizing it. The expansion plan included the construction of a number of new facilities, most notably a new visitor center and a 600-foot (180 m) walkway.
The plan was structured around five key areas of human and environmental health: sustainable site development, water conservation, energy efficiency, material selection, and indoor environmental quality. By employing a number of energy saving strategies with environmental sustainability considered throughout the project and recycling any trees removed during construction, significant efforts were made to make this expansion environmentally friendly. A 100,000-gallon cistern was installed underground in December 2007 to help with water conservation; the cistern fills with just an inch and a quarter of rain and watered about 40% of the new gardens.
One of the striking features of the new visitor center is an innovative green roof with plants that cover almost 50% of the roof area. This provides natural cooling, sound insulation and additional garden area for visitors and even a new habitat for wildlife. A visitor center leads visitors to a canopy walk.
The garden’s old parking lot is now a beautiful edible garden with an outdoor kitchen; this new garden puts food and healthy eating back in people’s hands. And the last aspect of the garden’s expansion plan is to transform its old entrance into a large cascading garden filled with tropical plants and flowing waterfalls.
Exhibits
The botanical garden consists of several smaller themed gardens. Each contains different landscapes to display a variety of plants. Formal gardens such as the Japanese garden and rose garden are located near the entrance. Two woodland areas, the 5-acre (20,000 m 2 ) Upper Woodland and the 10-acre (40,000 m 2 ) Storza Woods have large trees and shade-loving flowers and undergrowth. The Children’s Garden contains whimsical sculptures, fountains and interpretive exhibits on botany, ecology and nutrition.
The 16,000-square-foot (1,500 m2) Dorothy Chapman Fuqua Greenhouse contains indoor exhibits of plants from the rainforest and desert. The Fuqua Conservatory’s Rainforest Room is also populated with tropical birds, turtles, and several poisonous frog exhibits, the latter of which is a collaboration with Zoo Atlanta. Alongside this building, the Fuqua Orchid Center contains separate rooms that mimic the tropics and highlands to house rare orchids from around the world.
The Fuqua Orchid Center is home to the largest collection of orchid varieties permanently on display in the United States and hosts a winter exhibition known as Orchid Daze. Its unique Tropical High Elevation House provides the right habitat for mountain orchids and companion plants from the equator at altitudes of 6,000 to 10,000 feet. The Air Washer System, a technology adapted from the textile industry, has been combined with traditional greenhouse heating and cooling to create this environment and allow rare orchids to thrive. The Tropical Display House is filled with fragrant orchids from all over the world.