The Wonderful Botanical Garden in Meise
A week ago we visited the botanical garden in Meise near Brussels, with it’s 92 hectares and 18 000 varieties of plants it’s the biggest one in Belgium and it’s so worth a visit!
A New Culinary Garden
I’ve visited the botanical garden in Meise before but this time I wanted to visit it to see the new culinary garden that was opened only a few weeks ago. The culinary garden is located behind the Orangerie, where there’s a lovely restaurant if you fancy a bite or a drink during your visit to the gardens.
They’ve built new raised beds and are growing a range of vegetables – tomatoes, beans, peas, cabbages, spinach, potatoes, radishes and lots more. There were also fruit bushes and trees. And they are even growing hop (to show how it’s grown to make beer from it).
It was still early in the growing season – especially with the very cold spring we’ve had this year – so the garden hadn’t quite grown into the full abundance that it will surely will soon, but it already looked great!
And I noticed there was a space for doing cooking workshops. How fun would that be to do a workshop there with fresh vegetables from the garden!
The Rhododendron Forest
After visiting the culinary garden we walked around the rest of the gardens, first passing through the rhododendron forest which was looking absolutely gorgeous! They have many rhododendrons varieties and they were in bloom and made the forest look like a fairy tale scene!
The Castle
There’s a castle in the centre of the botanical garden, it dates back to the 12th century and once was home to Charlotte, Princess of Belgium and Empress of Mexico!
We only admired the castle from afar on our way to the rose garden. Next time we’ll try to visit it as well.
The Rose Garden
Next up was the rose garden, also newly landscaped. Unfortunately only a few wild roses were in bloom so far but I’m sure the garden will look splendid very soon when all the other roses are blooming too!
The Herb Garden with the Stunning Balat Greenhouse
You may remember from my visit to the Royal Greenhouses (which we actually visited on the same day as the gardens in Meise) that Alphonse Balat was the architect of those amazing royal greenhouses. And he also designed this much smaller but similarly beautiful greenhouse in the herb garden in the botanical garden in Meise. The herb beds fan around the greenhouse and the setting is just lovely!
The Big Greenhouses
I’m not sure what the exact surface area of these greenhouses at the botanical garden in Meise is but they are pretty big! Unfortunately we arrived quite late in Meise after our visit to the royal greenhouses so by the time we got to the big greenhouses here there were only 30 minutes left til closing time and there was a sign that it would take 20 minutes from there to walk to the exit so we basically had 10 minutes to see them! We managed to go through half of them at breakneck speed, but we’ll definitely have to come back some time to explore them more leisurely.
Good to Know about the Botanical Garden in Meise
If you plan to visit, make sure you plan to have enough time there! We arrived at about 3pm or maybe a little bit earlier, we had a bite to eat at the Orangerie and then started to wonder about but we ran out of time. The botanical garden closes at 6:30pm. I could easily have spent a few more hrs wondering about the gardens! We missed the medicinal garden, the pumpkin garden, the inside of the castle, half the big greenhouses, the amazing shop and possibly even more interesting parts of the botanical garden.
For all the up-to-date info about opening hrs, events there, ticket prices and much more, please visit their website.
There is some construction going on in the park. They are building a new entrance with visitor center and they are also replanting the island in the lake, but it should not keep you from enjoying the botanical garden in Meise, you don’t even notice this in most of the park.
Getting there
You can easily get there by public transport. Take the train to Brussels North and from there you can take the bus 250 or 251 (De Lijn). There’s a busstop right in front of the entrance. Google maps will tell you to get off the bus in Meise Boechtstraat and to walk for 12min, don’t do this!! You can get off the bus sooner in front of the entrance of the botanical garden!
There is a temporary entrance just 100m down the road from the original entrance and there’s a temporary busstop there as well.
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7 June 2021 by INE BEERTEN
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