Devonian Gardens

Devonian Gardens came into being with Toronto-Dominion Square, an office and retail complex completed in downtown Calgary in 1977: a five-storey podium carrying two 35-storey towers, designed by Skidmore, Owings & Merrill with J. H. Cook and Associates as architect of record. The garden, laid out on the top level of the retail podium, was donated to the city by the Devonian Group of Charitable Foundations and Calford Properties. The gift belongs to the philanthropy of Eric Harvie, the oil-enriched founder of the Glenbow, whose Devonian Foundation also paid for the Confederation Centre of the Arts and the Maritime Museum of the Atlantic.

Designed by J.H. Cook Architects and Engineers, the garden opened on 14 September 1977; Retail Insider puts its cost at $9 million, and it drew international attention. It held more than 20,000 plants, koi ponds, bridges and waterfalls.

In 2008 it closed for four years while the complex was rebuilt as the CORE Shopping Centre. City council committed $37 million; the project was led by McKinley Burkart Architecture and MMC Architects with Janet Rosenberg's landscape practice, while Design Workshop handled contract administration. The garden reopened on 27 June 2012 according to Retail Insider and CBC News (another source gives 27 July). Closed again in July 2016 for warranty work, it reopened on 25 July 2018. The City of Calgary runs it.

The garden fills an entire city block between 2nd and 3rd Streets SW on the fourth floor of the CORE Shopping Centre, a level it shares with the food court. The city gives its area as about one hectare (2.5 acres), while Design Workshop quotes 105,000 square feet, or roughly 9,750 m², for the 2012 project. It is less a botanical glasshouse than a covered park, with paths, terraces, pools, a playground and event rooms arranged like a city square under natural light and mild temperatures all year.

The renovation completed in 2012 gave the space a new, fully glazed high-performance envelope together with a redundant waterproofing system. It also installed a 900-square-foot (about 84 m²) living wall designed as a biofilter that cleans the air and removes odours, plus several further green walls near the garden's entrances. The wider redevelopment of the mall added a structural glass bridge on the same floor and unified the complex beneath a suspended skylight about 200 m long, made of 1,740 glass panels point-fixed beneath 95 arches and completed in November 2009.

The City of Calgary currently lists more than 550 trees and some fifty kinds of plants; its main page speaks of over 500 trees. The 2012 renovation brought in many new plants and trees, some of them from tropical regions. When the garden opened in 1977 it held more than 20,000 plants, of 135 species.

Two ponds with animated water features are home to koi, reintroduced after the works, and the South Garden has a goldfish pond, listed as temporarily closed for renovation. The 900-square-foot living wall, itself under restoration, completes the planting. The garden also shows art: a mural by the artist Emily Chu was painted there as part of the 2023 BUMP mural festival. For children, the playground offers a play structure with a slide, several climbing elements and a beginner climbing wall.

The garden is on the fourth floor of the CORE Shopping Centre, at 317 7th Avenue SW, on the block bounded by 8th Avenue between 2nd and 3rd Streets; it keeps the mall's hours and is free to enter all year. Tourism Calgary describes it as the city's only indoor park and suggests weekdays, before or after the lunch hour, for a quieter visit.

It suits a break with a book, a lunch among the plants or family portraits. It can also be booked for receptions and weddings: the Circle Garden takes up to 40 guests, the galleries 200 and the terrace 250. Some parts, such as the living wall or the South Garden pond, may be closed for maintenance at times, as the city's own listings indicate.