Orchid Oasis: A Tropical Day Trip Through the Worlds’ Flowers
by guest author, Ben Martin, Curatorial & Browse Gardener, Toronto Zoo
If you’ve ever stopped to smell a particularly lovely flower, or kept an orchid on your kitchen windowsill to admire its bloom through the cold winter, you’re not alone. Plants have a way of capturing our attention in the most fantastical ways – with colours, textures, and scents that instinctively grab our attention and give us pause. As the Curatorial and Browse Gardener at your Toronto Zoo, I have had the privilege of watching and connecting our visitors to this amazing world of plants – telling their stories and connections to the natural world around us every day. Within the Toronto Zoo, my role is built around connection – connecting our plants to our animals through growing the browse our animals eat, helping our horticulture team design and build the ecosystems our animals call home, and connecting our guests with the amazing plants we share this world with. My role teaches me things daily about how amazing plants are – if you take the time to look.
For orchids, this sense of wonder and moment of attention is their claim to fame. With over 25,000+ species across the globe, they are the largest flowering plant family – and also one of the oldest. From plants hidden high up in tropical rainforest canopies, down to the forest floor in Northern Ontario (yes, you read that right!)
These orchids have evolved to hide in plain sight, drawing attention to themselves only when they need to lure in a pollinator to reproduce. They specialize in their ability to draw these pollinators to them – through delightful aromas, dizzying colours, and dazzling shapes – all so that they can continue to grow in these challenging and unique environments. The very specialization that makes them unique is also what makes them the most vulnerable. While all plants are impacted by habitat loss, climate change, and unprecedented global pressures, one other challenge feels even closer to home: the illegal plant trade. Rare orchids are often taken from the wild to satisfy the public demand, leaving these already fragile populations unable to recover.
This is where the Toronto Zoo steps firmly beyond a place to visit and into its role as a conservation leader. At our core, we are Guardians of Wild. That title means protecting species where they live, educating people where they are, and taking meaningful actions in these communities. Recently, the Toronto Zoo joined the Illegal Plant Trade Coalition, recognizing that this is a conservation issue that we can all influence.
Unlike climate change – which requires long-term commitments and shared visions far beyond our homes – the choices we can make about what we buy, where we buy, and the questions we ask when sourcing plants can have an immediate impact. Small actions truly do add up. Behind the scenes, your Toronto Zoo horticulture team has been thoughtfully building and caring for our plant collection for more than 50 years. The stories we tell of cultural connection, food security, and the intersection between plants and people are years in the making.
The story of these connections, and the history of our zoo, comes to life in events like Orchid Oasis, which runs from February 14 to March 22, 2026. While it is designed to give us all a visual escape to tropical wonderlands in the middle of our cold Canadian winters, it’s also an invitation. The invitation is to pause and reflect – to ask questions about the beautiful world we live in – to see both the Forests AND the trees, viewing plants as living pieces of a world we too often take for granted.
Visiting Orchid Oasis is not just about enjoying the beauty of winter blooms. By joining us, you are supporting a zoo that plays a unique role within the GTA: as an AZA-accredited conservation organization, we are a local connection to a global conservation network. We offer a different, more tactile sort of education space for kids, families, and future stewards of our planet. Our world, just like orchids, thrives on connections and complexity.
As you visit Orchid Oasis, the hope from our horticulture team is that you leave with fewer winter blues and excitement over summer rainbows of colour in your backyard – trust us, it’s coming! Most of all, we hope you leave us with some reflection on how your choices shape this world we all call home.
We look forward to seeing you this month (and beyond!) as we continue to improve and grow together!
