Toronto Life: There’s a petition to double the space at Allan Gardens’ conservatory
Photo by Arrush Chopra/NurPhoto via Getty Images
The conservatory at Allan Gardens is one of the most beautiful spaces in Toronto: a gorgeous Victorian building topped with a glass dome and filled with all manner of succulents, cacti and bromeliads.
It’s also one of the few remaining public spaces in the city, functioning as a sort of public square with palms. Yes, you can ogle orchids and briefly pretend it’s July in February—but you can also catch an indie band, attend an Indigenous learning session or see families using the outdoor park space as the backyard they don’t have. Last year, the botanical gardens experienced a surge in visitors when it reopened in May after a protracted renovation: 2025 saw a record 30,000-plus people checking out the gardens.
Riding that renewed enthusiasm, Friends of Allan Gardens has launched a petition backing a project that would roughly double the complex’s footprint. The group is made up of a rotating cast of deeply committed civic obsessives with roughly 25 years of history stewarding the park. As the petition outlines, programming has been so successful that Allan Gardens has “outgrown its glass.”
According to Friends of Allan Gardens chair Michael McClelland, “Allan Gardens has become a victim of its own success: the space is doing far more than it was ever designed to handle.” Last year’s reopening proved that, when a space is invested in, people don’t just pass through—they use it. “Public spaces don’t survive on good intentions alone,” says McClelland. “They need stewardship. They need to be cared for, programmed and used, or they slowly fall apart.”
The glass structure dates back to 1858, but the conservatory as it exists today hasn’t seen any new glass since the 1950s, when earlier structures lost to fire were replaced piecemeal. Toronto’s population was 44,000 when the conservatory was first built—roughly the size of Timmins, Ontario—and the city has grown 70-fold since. The current proposal calls for a “missing link” greenhouse that would finally connect long-disjointed wings, effectively doubling the footprint of a conservatory that has remained Victorian in scale for its entire 168-year history.
The petition isn’t just a passion project dreamed up by fern fanatics; it’s a response to broader demand for free public green space. Friends of Allan Gardens hopes their vision will resonate with Mayor Olivia Chow, city council and perhaps even the province. They’re still in the early phases of budget building but plan to secure funding and approvals to move forward over the course of the coming year. Ideally, construction will be phased so that the gardens are never closed during what’s shaping up to be a roughly five-year project.
“Traditionally, greenhouses like Allan Gardens were colonial enterprises—places to collect and display plants from elsewhere,” says McClelland. However, this project would give preference to Canadian ecologies, including a proposed Arctic garden showcasing species that thrive in some of the harshest conditions on the planet. It also aims to expand the botanical garden’s food-growing capacity and climate-focused programming that connects horticulture to everyday urban life.
Most importantly, the proposal keeps Allan Gardens what it has always been: free and public—at a moment when the province seems far more interested in selling our green spaces off. (RIP, Ontario Place.)