Tropical Gardenia

A visit to Gardenia Tropical Garden and back.

I happened to notice a brochure for the Gardenia Tropical Garden by accident and was curious about it since I hadn't ever seen or heard anything mentioning it before. The garden opened in April 2001 and is situated in Viikki next to the Viikki-Vanhankaupunki bay nature reserve.

The garden is small, as the map will show, but it has a lot of lovely specimens packed into it. As soon as you enter the house you know you are in the tropics with mist raining down from above. It's warm, moist and green which is a welcome change of scenery after a long grey winter. It's quiet except for the hiss of misting systems overhead. Just beyond the courtyard of potted mimosa trees, there's an even more humid enclosed section housing a koi pond, bananas, some exotic ferns, vanilla and other tropicals. They also host classes in gardening and other horticultural topics for hobbyists and children. It's a lovely little garden, but having worked in research at the Missouri Botanical Garden with the Climatron, it loses some of the grandeur. It's funny how the US makes everything so big, so large and so grand most of the time that it tends to spoil anything less elsewhere. The Climatron is a truly amazing building that I used to walk through fairly often at lunchtime. It always looked like a spaceship nestled in a grove of trees and, in winter, it would be glowing late into the night making it look even more out of this world. I'd guess that Gardenia has the same look to it in the depths of the November darkness.