Denver Botanic Gardens
Colorado
Just east of Cheesman Park, the Denver Botanic Gardens were founded in nineteen fifty-one and moved to their current home on York Street in nineteen fifty-eight. The twenty-three-acre grounds hold what is recognized as North America's largest collection of plants from cold temperate climates, the kind of hardy flora suited to the altitude and dry winters of the Front Range. At the center sits the Boettcher Memorial Tropical Conservatory, added in nineteen sixty-six.
It was the first conservatory in the United States built entirely of concrete and Plexiglas panels, designed to channel condensation to the walls so it would not drip on visitors. The conservatory received landmark status in nineteen seventy-three. The grounds also include a Japanese garden called Shofu-en, meaning the Garden of Wind and Pines, and a sunken amphitheater that hosts a summer concert series each year.
In nineteen eighty-six the gardens created the world's first Xeriscape Demonstration Garden, devoted to water-wise planting for dry climates. Major sculpture exhibitions rotate through the grounds each season, placing large-scale contemporary works among the plantings. The site also sits above what was once Prospect Hill Cemetery, and soil disturbances as recently as two thousand eight have turned up remnants of that earlier use of the land.
