Zoo Gardens
Before being acquired by the society, the Corstorphine hill site was a nursery, once owned by Thomas Blaikie, who planted many of the great French parks such as ‘La Bagatelle’. It was on this site that two nurserymen raised the famous apple cultivars ‘John Downie’ and ‘James Grieve’. Today, the Zoo boasts one of the most diverse tree collections in the Lothians with some 120 species. The unique south facing aspect allows bananas to be grown outside. Increasingly, Zoo horticulture is seen as a discipline in its own right, with the focus on habitat creation within enclosures, food stuffs for the animals, and enrichment for both the animals and the visiting public.
Read more about this topic: Edinburgh Zoo
Famous quotes containing the words zoo and/or gardens:
“The zoo cannot but disappoint. The public purpose of zoos is to offer visitors the opportunity of looking at animals. Yet nowhere in a zoo can a stranger encounter the look of an animal. At the most, the animal’s gaze flickers and passes on. They look sideways. They look blindly beyond.”
—John Berger (b. 1926)
“These are the Gardens of the Desert, these
The unshorn fields, boundless and beautiful,
And fresh as the young earth, ere man had sinned—”
—William Cullen Bryant (1794–1878)