大萧条中动工的城市植物园
蒙特利尔植物园（Jardin botanique de Montréal）位于加拿大魁北克省蒙特利尔市东舍布鲁克街与庇护九世街的转角，地处迈松讷夫公园内，正对着 1976 年夏季奥运会的奥林匹克体育场。整座植物园占地 75 公顷，园中分布着 30 个左右的主题花园、约 10 座展览温室，以及一片 40 公顷的树木园。
植物园的正式奠基日是 1931 年 6 月 9 日。这一年正处在大萧条的高潮，蒙特利尔市议会批准了植物园的筹建方案，并安排了首批 10 万加元的失业救济经费，让工程在 1932 年 3 月 12 日破土动工。动工两年后，市政府经费告罄，工程停顿了将近四年。1936 年 5 月 6 日工程复工，七百多名工人投入建设，前后共投入约一千一百万加元。1939 年植物园首次对公众开放，至今仍由蒙特利尔市政府下属机构管理。
Marie-Victorin 神父与 Henry Teuscher
植物园的核心推动者是基督教学校兄弟会的修士 Marie-Victorin（俗名 Conrad Kirouac，1885-1944）。他同时是蒙特利尔大学植物学研究所的教授，也是经典著作《Flore laurentienne》的作者。从 1920 年代起，他就在各种场合鼓吹在蒙特利尔建立一座大型植物园。1929 年他在一场演讲中正式提出这一设想，台下坐着日后成为市长的 Camillien Houde，Houde 曾在 Longueuil 的 LaSalle 学院上过他的课。1930 年他牵头成立了蒙特利尔植物园协会，作为筹建平台。
园地的总体设计出自美国出生的德裔园艺师、景观建筑师 Henry Teuscher，他曾在纽约植物园担任树木学专家。Marie-Victorin 与他保持了几年的通信联系，直到 1936 年 Teuscher 出任植物园首席园艺师才正式赴任。两人的搭档关系贯穿了植物园最艰难的初创时期：Marie-Victorin 是精神的推动者，Teuscher 是把设想变成图纸和绿地的人。装饰风艺术风格的行政大楼则出自蒙特利尔市政府建筑师 Lucien F. Kéroack 之手，平面呈 H 形，1938 年他还创办了园艺学徒学校（L’École d’apprentissage horticole），为年轻学徒保留了园地中的一片教学区。1956 年展览温室落成时，Marie-Victorin 已经于 1944 年辞世，未能亲眼见到。
三十个主题花园与十座展览温室
植物园按照正式与田园两种风格交错布局。中央的迎宾花园采用布扎艺术风格，对称严谨；环绕四周的主题花园则多有英国风景园的曲折线条。树木园占地约 40 公顷，分 45 个植物收集区，是整个园地中面积最大的部分；玫瑰园收集了一万多株玫瑰，部分品种可以追溯到 1867 年加拿大联邦成立以前；高山花园在岩石堆上种植四千多种高山植物；阿尔卑斯山花园旁边是宁静的水生花园与感官庭园。园林之间散布着药用植物园、修道院花园、第一民族花园、和平花园、青年花园、创新花园、多年生花园、玫瑰花园、灌木花园、荫生植物园、魁北克角庭院和食草植物园等专题区域。
展览温室共有十座，分两期建成：1930 年代的服务性温室用于繁殖与育苗；1956 年落成的展览温室则向公众常年开放。温室内部按照植物科属划分为多个展室，包括天南星科、秋海棠科、盆景、凤梨、苏铁、仙人掌与多肉植物、蕨类、兰花与孢子植物等系列。冬季和早春时节，温室成为蒙特利尔人最常造访的去处，二月到四月还会举办一年一度的「Butterflies Go Free」蝴蝶展，让南美与北美的蝴蝶在温室中自由飞舞。
中国梦湖园与日本庭园
中国花园「梦湖园」（Le Jardin chinois）按照明代私园的风格建造，1990 年开工、1991 年落成，是蒙特利尔与上海结好的具体成果。整座花园占地 2.5 公顷，叠石假山、蜿蜒小径、亭台水榭一应俱全，园中建筑内陈列着来自中国捐赠的盆景与盆景艺术品。由上海园林设计院五十名工匠在现场施工，从中国江苏运来五百吨太湖石，分装一百二十只集装箱；总体设计由上海建筑师乐卫忠主持。园内植物均为中国原产种，每年中秋前后还会举办「The Magic of Lanterns」中秋灯会，夜间点亮的剪影灯让整座花园呈现出与白天截然不同的样貌。
日本庭园建于 1988 年，由设计师 Ken Nakajima 主持，占地 2.5 公顷。庭园内的日式建筑常年展出茶道器具，夏季有正式的茶道演示，访客可以预约参加茶道课程；剑道、居合道与花道等日本传统艺术也偶尔在此演示。园中有一座大型锦鲤池，访客经常可以投喂锦鲤。每年 8 月 5 日，庭园会举办广岛原子弹爆炸纪念活动，按时敲响一口由广岛铸造的和平钟。日本庭园与中国花园之间是 2001 年开放的「第一民族花园」，种植加拿大原住民传统使用的药用植物与食用植物，园中立着多根图腾柱，是游客了解北美原住民文化的窗口。1992 年，法国里昂市赠送的里昂狮子雕塑被安置在玫瑰园入口，以纪念蒙特利尔建市 350 周年。
Space for Life 体系与城市中的科学基地
蒙特利尔植物园如今归属于 Espace pour la vie（Space for Life）这一市级自然科学机构群。Space for Life 在 2011 年由原蒙特利尔自然博物馆重组而成，旗下共有五座场馆：植物园、生物圈（Biosphère）、昆虫馆（Insectarium）、生态馆（Biodôme）和里奥 Tinto Alcan 行星馆（Planétarium），其中昆虫馆就坐落在植物园内。植物园距离蒙特利尔地铁绿线的 Pie-IX 站步行五分钟，是几座场馆中交通最便利的一座；生态馆与行星馆则步行约十分钟可达。
植物园的研究功能同样扎实。园内的 Marie-Victorin 标本馆收藏了代表魁北克 99% 维管植物的标本；蒙特利尔大学的 Ouellet-Robert 昆虫学收藏（QMOR）有约 150 万件昆虫标本，是加拿大最重要的昆虫收藏之一、魁北克省第二大收藏。此外，植物园在教育方面设有城市园艺培训项目，与蒙特利尔大学联合培养研究生。1976 年夏季奥运会期间，植物园承办了 20 公里竞走比赛和现代五项中的跑步项目，园区的步道与林地至今仍是长跑爱好者的常用训练场地。游客可在 Pie-IX 地铁站下车后步行入园，外地访客搭乘地铁也可直达。
A City Botanical Garden Built During the Great Depression
The Montreal Botanical Garden (Jardin botanique de Montréal) sits in the borough of Rosemont–La Petite-Patrie, in eastern Montréal, where Sherbrooke Street East meets Pie-IX Boulevard. It lies inside Maisonneuve Park, facing the Olympic Stadium built for the 1976 Summer Olympics. The site covers 75 hectares and contains around thirty thematic gardens, roughly ten exhibition greenhouses, and an arboretum that alone takes up about 40 hectares.
The garden was officially founded on June 9, 1931, at the height of the Great Depression. Montréal city council approved the project that year and earmarked 100,000 Canadian dollars in unemployment relief funds, allowing work to begin on March 12, 1932. Two years later, with municipal funds exhausted, construction halted for nearly four years. Work resumed on May 6, 1936, and the site eventually employed more than seven hundred workers, with total investment reaching about eleven million dollars. The garden opened to the public in 1939 and remains run by the City of Montréal to this day.
Brother Marie-Victorin and Henry Teuscher
The driving force behind the garden was Brother Marie-Victorin (born Conrad Kirouac, 1885–1944), a member of the Christian Brothers who taught botany at the Université de Montréal and wrote the classic field guide Flore laurentienne. He had been campaigning for a Montréal botanical garden since the early 1920s. In 1929 he presented the idea in a public lecture; in the audience sat Camillien Houde, a former student of his from Collège LaSalle in Longueuil, who later became mayor. In 1930 Marie-Victorin founded the Association du Jardin Botanique de Montréal to push the project forward.
The site plan came from Henry Teuscher, an American-born horticulturist and landscape architect of German descent who had been working at the New York Botanical Garden as a tree specialist. Marie-Victorin and Teuscher had been exchanging plans and ideas by mail for years; in 1936 Teuscher finally took up his post as chief horticulturalist. Together they saw the garden through its most difficult early years: Marie-Victorin as the public champion, Teuscher as the man who turned the drawings into hedges, beds, and trees. The Art Deco administration building, with its characteristic H-shaped plan, was designed by Lucien F. Kéroack, the city’s architect. In 1938 Marie-Victorin founded L’École d’apprentissage horticole, setting aside part of the garden as a teaching ground for young apprentices. By the time the exhibition greenhouses opened in 1956, Marie-Victorin had already passed away, in 1944, on a botanical field trip near Saint-Hyacinthe.
Thirty Thematic Gardens and Ten Greenhouses
The garden mixes formal Beaux-Arts symmetry with the looser lines of the English picturesque style. At its centre lies a Reception Garden designed in the Beaux-Arts tradition, with octagonal and cascading basins, limestone walls, and zig-zag Art Deco motifs. Around it, a series of themed gardens unfolds across the site: a Rose Garden with more than 10,000 rose bushes, some descended from specimens planted before 1867; an Alpine Garden that winds over a rocky outcrop planted with 4,000 alpine species; an Aquatic Garden; a First Nations Garden; a Monastery Garden; a Medicinal Plants Garden; a Courtyard of the Senses; a Youth Garden; a Garden of Innovations replanted each year; and Quebec Corner, which showcases native maples, birches, and hickories. The Arboretum, divided into 45 collections, takes up 40 hectares on its own.
The greenhouses come in two waves. The service greenhouses of the 1930s were used for propagation and research; the exhibition greenhouses opened to the public in 1956 and have stayed open year-round since then. Inside, the collections are arranged by plant family: Araceae, Begoniaceae, bonsai, bromeliads, cycads, cacti and succulents, ferns, orchids, and a spore-plant room. In winter and early spring the greenhouses become one of the warmest public spaces in the city, and from February to April they host Butterflies Go Free, an annual exhibit in which tropical and temperate butterflies fly freely among the visitors.
The Chinese Garden and the Japanese Garden
The Chinese Garden, Le Jardin chinois, was built in the style of a Ming-dynasty private garden. Construction ran from 1990 to 1991 and was a sister-project between Montréal and Shanghai. The garden covers 2.5 hectares, with winding paths, an artificial mountain, a pond, and a Chinese-style pavilion housing donated penjing and bonsai collections. The design was led by Le Weizhong of the Shanghai Institute of Landscape Design and Architecture, with fifty Shanghai artisans working on site. One hundred and twenty shipping containers arrived from China, including five hundred tonnes of Lake Tai stones imported from Jiangsu. Every autumn, around the Mid-Autumn Festival, the garden hosts The Magic of Lanterns, when hand-cut lanterns are lit across the paths and water.
The Japanese Garden was created in 1988 under the designer Ken Nakajima. It also covers 2.5 hectares and contains a Japanese-style building that displays tea implements; tea ceremonies are performed in summer, and visitors can book classes to learn the basics. Other traditional arts, including Iaido and Ikebana, are sometimes demonstrated on the grounds. A large koi pond attracts families who like to feed the fish. Each year on August 5, the garden hosts a memorial for the atomic bombing, with the hourly ringing of a Japanese Peace Bell cast in Hiroshima. Between the two Asian gardens sits the First Nations Garden, opened in 2001, with maple, birch, and pine shade over paths lined with medicinal and food plants used by Canada’s First Nations, and several totem poles standing among the beds. In 1992, the city of Lyon donated a bronze Lion de la Feuillée, which now lies at the entrance to the Rose Garden to mark Montréal’s 350th anniversary.
Space for Life and the Garden as a Scientific Hub
The Montreal Botanical Garden today belongs to Space for Life (Espace pour la vie), a museum district established in 2011 to regroup the natural science museums of Montréal. Space for Life oversees five sites: the Botanical Garden, the Biodôme, the Biosphère, the Insectarium, and the Rio Tinto Alcan Planetarium. The Insectarium is physically located on the garden grounds; the Biodôme and Planetarium lie about a ten-minute walk away, near the Olympic Stadium. The nearest métro station is Pie-IX on the green line, a short walk from the garden’s main gates.
The garden is also a working scientific institution. The Marie-Victorin Herbarium holds specimens representing 99% of Québec’s vascular plant species. The Ouellet-Robert Entomological Collection (QMOR), run with the Université de Montréal, holds around 1.5 million insect specimens, making it one of Canada’s largest such collections and the second largest in Québec. The garden runs professional training programs in urban horticulture and hosts graduate researchers from the Université de Montréal’s Institut de recherche en biologie végétale. During the 1976 Summer Olympics, the grounds hosted the 20-kilometre race walk and the running portion of the modern pentathlon; the paths are still used by long-distance runners from across the city. The nearest métro station is Pie-IX on the green line, a short walk from the garden’s main gates.
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