Gardens by the Bay and the Making of Singapore's City in a Garden

The story usually begins in 1967. Lee Kuan Yew, the country’s first prime minister, launched a programme to turn the young republic into a garden city: trees along every expressway, planting in every housing estate, a deliberate softening of a hard, fast-growing city. Part of the reasoning was practical, shade and cooler streets in an equatorial climate. Part of it was about how Singapore wanted to look to investors and visitors who might otherwise see it as a port and little else.

Decades later the National Parks Board, known locally as NParks, pushed the idea further. Instead of a city with gardens in it, planners began to talk about a city in a garden, where parks, park connectors and nature reserves would form a continuous green setting with the buildings placed inside it. Since 2020 the official phrase has shifted again, to City in Nature, with more emphasis on restoring habitats rather than decorating streets.

Gardens by the Bay was the showpiece of the middle phase. NParks set up an international design competition in 2006 for a large site of reclaimed land at the mouth of the Marina Reservoir. The British landscape practice Grant Associates won the master plan for Bay South, the largest of the three sections. WilkinsonEyre, also British, designed the two conservatories. The gardens opened on 29 June 2012, and by October 2018 they had counted 50 million visitors.

Arrive in the afternoon and the grove looks different from the evening postcards. The Supertrees are not sculptures in the usual sense. Each has a reinforced concrete core, a steel frame that flares out like an upturned umbrella, and a skin of planting panels that hold tens of thousands of plants between them: bromeliads, ferns, orchids and climbers chosen to tolerate life on a vertical surface in full tropical sun.

The trees range from 25 to 50 metres tall. That spread matters when you stand among them, because it gives the grove depth, the way a real stand of trees has young and old trunks at different heights. The OCBC Skyway, a raised walkway, links two of the larger trees and gives a view down onto the paths and across to the hotel towers. The tallest tree has its own observation deck, the Supertree Observatory, opened at the end of 2019.

The steel canopies also do some plumbing. Several carry photovoltaic cells, and the structures collect rainwater and serve as air intakes and exhausts for the cooling systems of the conservatories. The Supertrees are part of the machinery that keeps two glasshouses of foreign climates alive at sea level on the equator.

Across the water rises Marina Bay Sands, opened in 2010, its three towers joined at the top by a long platform with a rooftop pool. The hotel and the gardens were developed in the same era of land reclamation around the bay, and from the grove they read almost as one composition: the hard silhouette and the soft one.

Stepping from the outdoor heat into the Flower Dome brings a small shock of relief. The conservatory covers about 1.2 hectares and holds a cool, dry climate of the kind found around the Mediterranean, in parts of California, southern Africa, Chile and southwestern Australia. In 2015 Guinness World Records listed it as the largest glass greenhouse in the world, and the roof is held up without interior columns, which gives the space its open, airy feel.

The planting is organised in themed gardens. Baobabs and bottle trees stand near succulents that look like coral, olive trees grow in a grove of their own, and there are cork oaks with their thick, spongy bark. The cork oak is a good example of what the dome is trying to do. Most visitors know cork only as a bottle stopper. Seeing the living tree, and reading how cork forests in Portugal and Spain depend on the market for natural cork to stay economically worth keeping, gives the plant a context that a photograph never quite manages.

A seasonal display fills the central flower field and changes several times a year, with tulips, dahlias or chrysanthemums depending on the season and the festival calendar. Singaporeans come back for these shows the way people elsewhere return to a park in spring.

The second conservatory works the other way. The Cloud Forest recreates the cool, damp conditions of tropical mountains between roughly 1,000 and 3,000 metres above sea level, the habitat where cloud and mist are a constant water supply. Inside, a 42-metre artificial mountain is wrapped in mosses, ferns, orchids and pitcher plants, and a 35-metre waterfall pours from its upper edge with enough force to fill the hall with spray and noise.

Visitors take a lift to the top of the mountain and walk down along an aerial path that loops outside the planted walls. Near the summit the air is noticeably cooler. Further down, galleries explain how cloud forests strip moisture from passing clouds and feed rivers far below, and how warming temperatures threaten that system by pushing the cloud layer higher up the slopes.

It is a strange experience to learn about climate change inside an air-conditioned dome. Critics of the gardens have made the point directly, asking how much energy it takes to maintain foreign climates in a hot country. The designers’ answer was to build efficiency into the structure: cooling only the lower zones where people and plants are, using special glass that lets in light while limiting heat, and linking the system to the Supertrees and to energy recovered on site. The domes still consume power. The argument is that they consume much less than a conventional glasshouse of the same size would.

Gardens by the Bay is the loudest expression of the city in a garden idea, but not the oldest or perhaps the most convincing. On the other side of the city centre, the Singapore Botanic Gardens date from 1859 and became the country’s first UNESCO World Heritage Site in 2015. Its National Orchid Garden holds a huge collection of hybrids, and the remnant of original rainforest inside the grounds is a quiet reminder of what covered the island before the plantations and the city.

To the north, the Central Catchment Nature Reserve and Bukit Timah Nature Reserve protect some of the last primary forest in Singapore. Long-tailed macaques, monitor lizards and a surprising number of bird species live within a short bus ride of shopping centres. A network of park connectors, cycle and walking routes along rivers and drainage canals, lets residents travel long distances through green corridors without touching a main road.

Then there is the airport. Jewel Changi, opened in 2019, wraps an indoor forest around the Rain Vortex, a waterfall that drops from an opening in the glass roof. Travellers with a long layover often see Singapore’s planting obsession before they see anything else of the country, which is presumably the point.

A short aside on the food. Satay by the Bay, the open-air food centre at the far end of Bay South, became a fixture for visitors who wanted grilled skewers and sugar cane juice after the light show. It was scheduled to close on 1 October 2026 to make way for Wetlands by the Bay, an expansion announced in March 2026 that will enlarge the wetland gardens, add a new museum building and replace the food centre with a two-storey block, opening in stages from late 2028. Hawker culture itself is not going anywhere: Singapore’s hawker centres were added to UNESCO’s list of intangible cultural heritage in 2020.

Spending a day in Singapore with an eye on the plants changes the way the city reads. Flyovers are draped with bougainvillea. Office towers carry sky gardens on their upper floors. Rooftop planting has been encouraged through planning incentives, so that greenery lost at ground level can be replaced higher up. None of this makes Singapore a wild place. It remains one of the most densely built countries on earth, and its nature is heavily managed.

What Gardens by the Bay does well is make that management visible. The Supertrees do not pretend to be real trees. The domes do not pretend to be anything other than machines for growing plants in the wrong climate. The visitor is invited to admire the engineering and the planting at the same time, and to think about how much effort it takes to keep a green city green.

For travellers comparing urban green spaces, the gardens sit in an interesting middle ground between a botanical institution and a theme park. Cities like Melbourne, described in this Melbourne city guide, grew their parks gradually over a century and a half. Singapore built a large share of its showpiece greenery within a single generation and on land that did not exist before reclamation.

The contrast with places that never had to grow their nature back is striking. The forests of the Himalaya in this story on Bhutan’s Himalayan harmony are protected by a constitutional pledge to keep much of the country under forest cover. In Costa Rica, a small community has built homes among the treetops instead of clearing them, as told in the story of Finca Bellavista’s tree house community. And photographers who document glaciers and coastlines, like those featured in Images from a Warming Planet, show what Singapore’s cloud forest galleries can only describe.

The outdoor gardens, including the Supertree Grove, are free to enter and open from early morning until late evening. Tickets are needed for the two conservatories, the OCBC Skyway and the Supertree Observatory, and combined tickets are sold for the domes. Prices and opening hours change, so the official Gardens by the Bay website is the place to check before a visit.

The nearest metro station is Bayfront, on the Circle and Downtown lines, with an underground link and a short walk through the Marina Bay Sands complex to the Dragonfly Bridge. Taxis drop off at the main entrance on the Bay South side.

Singapore is hot and humid all year, with afternoon storms common in the monsoon months. The conservatories are the obvious refuge in the middle of the day. The light show runs twice nightly, at 7.45pm and 8.45pm, and the later session is usually less crowded, especially on weekdays.

One last practical detail: lie down. The paved areas under the Supertrees are wide and clean, and during the show many locals simply stretch out on their backs to watch the canopies light up overhead, which is by far the best angle.