Montreal Botanical Garden
Montreal Botanical Garden, botanical garden in Montreal founded in 1936 by Frère Marie-Victorin, one of the greatest of Canadian botanists. Spanning more than 75 hectares (185 acres), the Montreal Botanical Garden has approximately 20,000 plant species and cultivars under cultivation and maintains a herbarium consisting of nearly 100,000 reference specimens. Of the garden’s many greenhouses, 10 are for public display and 23 for service functions and research collections. Its significant collections and special gardens contain commercially important plants, medicinal herbs, alpine plants, woodland plants, ferns, bonsai, cacti and other succulents, begonias, aroids, bromeliads, gesneriads, and orchids. Other notable features include water gardens, a rock garden arranged by geographic region, a First Nations garden with plants of ethnobotanical importance to Native Americans, a collection of cultivated perennial herbaceous plants for home gardeners, and an arboretum. The Plant Biology Research Institute (Institut de Recherche en Biologie Végétale) of the University of Montreal uses some of the garden’s facilities, and, together, the two institutions form an important botanical research centre.