Singapore: Gardens by the Bay – Singapore’s Green Heart

🌿 Singapore: Gardens by the Bay – Singapore’s Green Heart

The Gardens by the Bay is a nature park spanning 101 hectares on reclaimed land along the Marina Bay waterfront. The park consists of three waterfront gardens — Bay South, Bay East and Bay Central — the largest of which is the Bay South Garden. Its Flower Dome holds the record as the largest glass greenhouse in the world, a title it has held since 2015 when it entered the Guinness World Records.

Late one afternoon, we caught the bus out to Singapore Bay, and it felt long overdue. The truth is, on a previous multi-day stay in Singapore, I had been laid up with broken ribs — which, for those who haven’t had the pleasure, is about as much fun as it sounds. Every cough, every step on uneven pavement, every enthusiastic taxi driver going over a speed bump: agony. We were fairly limited in what we could do on that visit, and sadly Gardens by the Bay was one of the things that had to go. So this time round, nothing was going to stop us getting there, short of another cycling accident, which I have absolutely promised Karen will never happen again.

We walked through the Supertree Grove first, which was every bit as bonkers and brilliant as it looked in every photo we’d ever seen of it. These extraordinary vertical gardens — eighteen of them in total, built between 2006 and 2012 as part of the wider garden development that opened in June 2012 — rise to between 25 and 50 metres in height. They’re not actually trees, of course, but reinforced concrete and steel structures clad in living plants: ferns, bromeliads, orchids and mosses, all carefully chosen for their ability to grow vertically in Singapore’s equatorial climate. The canopies serve an actual purpose too — they collect rainwater, generate solar power and act as exhaust vents for the two cooled conservatories below, which was a detail we didn’t know until we read the information boards and felt considerably more impressed. At night, the whole grove transforms into something genuinely magical, with the trees lighting up in synchrony with music, but we’ll come to that. We were getting hungry by this point, so before we got too distracted we nipped into Shake Shack — which has somehow followed us to Singapore — for something to eat and a sit down.

🌊 The Cloud Forest

We’d bought tickets to visit both of the two main domes — the Cloud Forest and the Flower Dome — and we started with the Cloud Forest, which was running a rather spectacular special exhibit on Avatar at the time, since the second film in the franchise, The Way of Water, had only just been released. The timing was fortunate because the Avatar world — with its bioluminescent plants, impossibly tall floating formations and alien ecology — is about as fitting a theme as you could possibly dream up for a dome that is already, by any reasonable measure, one of the most extraordinary interior spaces we have ever walked into.

Some context, because it genuinely merits it: the Cloud Forest Dome was designed by the British architectural firm Wilkinson Eyre and opened in June 2012 alongside the rest of the Bay South Garden, having taken six years of planning and construction. The idea behind it was to recreate the cool, moist environment found in tropical mountain regions between 1,000 and 3,500 metres above sea level — the kind of climate you’d find in highland rainforests in places like Borneo, Sri Lanka and the Andes. Singapore sits at sea level, is roughly one degree north of the equator and hovers around 30–32°C for most of the year with humidity that makes you feel as though you’re walking through warm soup. Inside the dome, the temperature drops to a refreshing 23–25°C and the air is kept properly humid, which the thousands of plants inside absolutely love, and which the humans inside also love after an afternoon in the city.

The Cloud Forest houses more than thousands of plants from 135 different species gathered from all around the world — carnivorous pitcher plants, jewel orchids, club mosses that look like something from the Carboniferous period, and bromeliads in colours that seem to have been dreamt up by someone with an extremely vivid imagination. At the heart of it all sits the 42-metre cloud mountain — 138 feet if you prefer it in old money — the world’s tallest indoor waterfall cascading down its face, which holds the record as the world’s second-largest indoor waterfall and sends a constant cool mist drifting across the lower levels of the dome in a way that is both dramatically atmospheric and genuinely useful if your glasses fog up easily. Ours did.

We spent a good while at the base of the cloud mountain, stopping every few minutes to photograph the Avatar characters positioned among the plants — the Na’vi figures, the Pandoran flora, the floating seed-like Spirit Tree wisps all set against real living plants that honestly didn’t look all that different from the ones the production designers had invented. They’d also set up some booths where you could see yourself transformed into the blue, wide-eyed form of a Na’vi from the films, which Karen declared was uncanny and I declared was the best I’d looked in years, which earned the response it deserved.

We took the lift to the very top of the cloud mountain and then began the long, winding walk down through the elevated walkways that loop around the structure and bring you out at various heights above the forest floor below, looking down through layers of green onto the plants and waterfall cascades far beneath your feet. Now, we should say plainly: if you suffer badly from vertigo, this is going to be a tough afternoon. The walkways are perfectly safe — there are barriers, they are solid underfoot, the engineering is faultless — but you are up in the air, looking down through open ironwork at a very significant drop, and the combination of height and mist and the sheer scale of the structure is a lot to take in at once. That said, it was absolutely stunning. We took our time coming down, pausing constantly to photograph the plants and the waterfall from above, and the Avatar installations woven through it all felt surprisingly natural — surreal, yes, utterly bizarre in concept, but somehow in keeping with the alien lushness of the space around them. By the time we reached the bottom, we were both thoroughly delighted. We loved it.

🌸 The Flower Dome

Adjacent to the Cloud Forest, connected by an indoor passage, is the Flower Dome — and it has to be said upfront that coming to it directly after the Cloud Forest is a slightly cruel sequencing, because the Cloud Forest is an extraordinarily hard act to follow. The Flower Dome is not as immediately spectacular — it lacks the vertiginous mountain, the waterfall, the Avatar characters and the sheer theatrical drama of its neighbour — but it is interesting and beautiful in its own quieter way, and once you settle into it properly it rewards a slow wander.

The Flower Dome was designed to replicate the cool, dry Mediterranean climate found in places like South Africa’s Cape region, California’s central valley, southern Australia and the Mediterranean basin itself — parts of the world that sit between roughly 30 and 40 degrees latitude, experience warm, dry summers and mild, wet winters, and have produced some of the world’s most distinctive plant communities as a result. The dome holds the Guinness World Record for the largest glass greenhouse in the world, covering 1.2 hectares, and is kept at a cool 23–25°C to support the Mediterranean and semi-arid plants inside — which means it also doubles as a very welcome air-conditioned refuge on a hot Singapore afternoon. Construction of the conservatory cost approximately SGD 1 billion in total (alongside the Cloud Forest and surrounding infrastructure) and the engineering challenge of creating a column-free glass greenhouse at this scale in a tropical climate was, by any measure, a remarkable achievement.

The interior is laid out as a series of themed garden zones representing different regions: Australia, South Africa, California, the Mediterranean, South America and others, each with its own characteristic planting. Olive trees, baobabs, cacti, proteas, flowering aloes — the diversity is genuinely impressive when you slow down and look properly rather than rushing through. When we visited, Chinese New Year was approaching, and the dome’s central display area had already been partially transformed for the celebrations, with an elaborate seasonal installation that — as you might expect for the Year of the Rabbit — featured a considerable number of rabbits. Enormous ones, small decorative ones, lantern rabbits, sculptural rabbits. An absolute embarrassment of rabbits, frankly, and all of it rather charming.