Discovery garden

The Discovery garden appeals to all of your senses: come and smell, see, feel, taste and even hear plantlife. It truly is a garden for exploration and discovery. 

In the garden, you will find seventeen theme beds, each of which highlights the specific characteristics of plants and/or their use by humans in different ways. In addition to several permanent themes, such as medicinal plants, other themes are changed occasionally. 

The Discovery garden was specially designed and laid out to make it accessible for people with a disability. Raised path edges help the visually impaired to find their way around and many of the plants are specially arranged to enable wheelchair users to experience the plants at close hand.

Utrecht praries

In the prairie section of the Discovery garden, we allow the vegetation to grow as naturally as possible. Some species will dominate, while others will disappear. The tallgrass prairie thrives in our clay soil. We replaced the top layer of the shortgrass prairie with a sandy mixture.
Real prairie plants that also occur in the wild grow here too. This allows us to provide as realistic a picture as possible of the American prairies*. Grasses dominate there. Flowers dominate the Utrecht prairie, because that is more attractive to visitors.

* The area of natural prairies in the United States has almost completely disappeared due to intensive agriculture.