Gardens

Newquay Zoo is not only home to hundreds of different species of animals, but it is also a lush sub-tropical garden filled with beautiful plants from around the world.

Enclosures are planted to create realistic and natural environments for the animals. Cornwall has a famously rich heritage of gardens for pleasure, display or education, often with links to the plant hunters who brought back to Cornwall new plants that thrived in the mild, damp maritime, almost subtropical climate of the county.

Oriental Garden

This beautiful garden showcases a variety of Japanese and Asian plants including Acers and Azaleas. The garden follows a traditional planting style found in Japanese garden design.

World War Zoo Memorial Garden

The wartime garden reflects the Dig For Victory gardens that sprang up in unlikely places all over the country, including zoos. It also acts as a living memorial to the bravery of many ordinary men, women and children of the World Wars. The garden demonstrates how wartime zoo keepers grew food for their animals. Crops grown are regularly harvested and fed to the animals, providing fresh, in season food for them. Spinach has proved a hit with the macaques, pak choi and fresh leeks with the capuchins, lolla rossa lettuce and savoy cabbage with the African pygmy goats and carrot tops are popular with our turkeys.

Cornish Dragon Maze

Designed by renowned maze designer Adrian Fisher in the 1980s, the Dragon Maze is formed out of hedges, providing lots of insects and bird life to Newquay Zoo.

Native wildflowers

As you explore the Zoo you will see that large areas have been left to create wild spaces where bluebells, primroses, daffodils, narcissi and other native plants can be found along stream banks and hedges. Plants like nettles and brambles may be considered as weeds, but they provide food for hundreds of species, so by allowing them to grow we can encourage native species of insects and birds to the Zoo.

Tropical House rainforest

Heat and high rainfall characterise tropical forest ecosystems, providing a home for hundreds of species of animal in the world. Over two thirds of the world's plant species can be found in tropical rainforests, providing much of the world's oxygen supply. Rainforest habitat is made up of layers; the canopy, a shrub layer and the forest floor which is covered in mosses and ferns. The open rainforest exhibit in the Tropical House at Newquay Zoo is a humid jungle, featuring plants that occur naturally in rainforests around the world.