The Montreal Botanical Garden

What it is

The Montreal Botanical Garden was founded in 1931 by Brother Marie-Victorin, a botanist and teacher, and built partly as a public works project during the Depression. It holds some twenty thousand kinds of plants in thirty themed gardens and ten exhibition greenhouses, which keep it open through the long Quebec winter. The short growing season makes summer intense. Lilacs and crabapples flower in May, followed by peonies and irises, a rose garden of thousands of bushes, and beds of lilies and daylilies. The Chinese garden, made with craftsmen from Shanghai, and the Japanese garden are lit with lanterns on autumn evenings. A First Nations garden shows plants used by Indigenous peoples of Quebec.

Before you go

• Late May for lilacs, late June and July for roses and peonies.
• Allow half a day, and use the small shuttle if walking is hard.
• The lantern evenings in September and October need a separate timed ticket.

The flowers you will see

Common LilacA spring-flowering shrub with fragrant purple or white bloomsRoseWoody perennial plants with showy, often fragrant flowers in many coloursPeonyLarge spring flowers in pink, red, white, yellow and purple, grown in gardens worldwideLilyTall bulb flowers with large, colourful blooms in many gardens and culturesSacred lotusThe pink aquatic flower sacred in Asia and grown for food, worship and beauty

More in Canada

🇨🇦 Ottawa · MayThe Canadian Tulip Festival in OttawaHundreds of thousands of tulips flower beside Dow's Lake each May, a tradition that began with a gift from the Dutch. 🇨🇦 Victoria · Mar to OctThe Butchart Gardens near VictoriaA worked-out limestone quarry on Vancouver Island that one family turned into a sunken garden of bedding and bulbs.