Gardens by the Bay
Interesting facts
- The Flower Dome was listed by Guinness World Records in 2015 as the largest glass greenhouse in the world, covering 1.2 hectares without a single interior column.
- Inside the Cloud Forest dome stands a 42-metre 'Cloud Mountain' clad in orchids and ferns, with a 35-metre indoor waterfall that the descending path crosses again and again.
- Grant Associates based the master plan on an orchid, the national flower Vanda Miss Joaquim, with conservatories as roots, paths as shoots and theme gardens as blooms.
- The 2006 design competition drew more than 70 entries from 170 firms in 24 countries, won by the British practices Grant Associates and Gustafson Porter.
- The Cloud Forest recreates the cool, moist climate of tropical mountains between 1,000 and 3,000 metres above sea level.
- The tallest Supertree, 50 metres high, houses an observatory and open-air rooftop deck that opened in December 2019.
- The park passed 50 million visitors by 2018, only six years after its main garden opened in June 2012.
- The gardens were announced by Prime Minister Lee Hsien Loong in 2005, in a plan to turn Singapore from a Garden City into a City in a Garden.
- The Supertree Grove appears in Planet Earth II and Crazy Rich Asians, and the planet Xandar in Guardians of the Galaxy took inspiration from the park.
- In 2022 New Zealand's prime minister presented a carved Mฤori kลซwaha, a ceremonial gateway, which now stands in the Cloud Forest.
Why it is worth it
The eighteen Supertrees at Gardens by the Bay look like sculpture, but they're closer to infrastructure disguised as sculpture. Each one is a reinforced-concrete trunk, 25 to 50 metres tall, wrapped in a steel frame and dressed with planting panels holding some of the more than 162,900 plants โ over 200 species of bromeliads, orchids, ferns and flowering climbers โ spread across a vegetative surface nearly eight times larger than the trees' actual footprint on the ground. That's the visible part. The functional part is underground and inside the trunks: the Supertrees are built to work as environmental engines for the neighboring cooled conservatories, channeling rainwater collection, acting as intake and exhaust vents for the climate-control systems that keep the domes at a comfortable temperature in Singapore's tropical heat, and carrying solar panels on some of the canopies that help power the nightly light-and-sound show.
The whole 101-hectare park sits on land that didn't exist a few decades ago โ reclaimed from the sea as part of Singapore's long-running program of expanding its usable land area, and given over entirely to a garden rather than housing or industry, which for a small island nation with some of the highest land values on earth is itself a statement of priorities.
What makes the Supertrees more than a decorative gimmick is the honesty of the engineering trade-off they represent: rather than pretending a tropical garden in an equatorial city can run without energy-intensive climate control, the design puts the machinery in full view and dresses it as a forest canopy โ refrigeration you're meant to notice.
Getting there
Located in Singapore. Seletar Airport (XSP) is about 15 km away.
Plan your visit
We have no confirmed visit data yet. Once it is confirmed, this block also carries the date it was checked.
Nearby places
- The Helix Bridge 0.7 km ยท bridge
- Henderson Waves 5.6 km ยท bridge
- Singapore Zoo 15.8 km ยท zoo
On these lists
From the encyclopaedia
The Gardens by the Bay (GBTB) is an urban park spanning 105 hectares in the Central Region of Singapore, adjacent to the Marina Reservoir. The park consists of three waterfront gardens: Bay South Garden in Marina South, Bay East Garden with the Founders' Memorial in Marina East, and Bay Central Garden in the Downtown Core and Kallang. The largest of the gardens at 54 hectares is the Bay South Garden, designed by Grant Associates. Its Flower Dome is the largest glass greenhouse in the world.
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