More than 120,000 tulips are planted by the botanical team and volunteers annually.
Photograph by Lisa Hubbard
Steve Foltz can name every plant in the Cincinnati Zoo & Botanical Gardens. Over the course of our interview, sitting on a bench between the Galapagos tortoises and the Reptile House, he pointed out and identified each in the vicinity—oakleaf hydrangeas, weeping katsura, and blue salvia, to name a few. After more than 38 years working at the zoo, it comes easy to Foltz, the director of horticulture.
The Cincinnati Zoo is one massive botanical garden with various groves, plant shows, floral displays, and more within its grounds. The 15-person botanical team and its volunteers plant more than 5,000 perennials and shrubs, 60,000 annuals, and 120,000 tulips every year. To accomplish such a feat, the zoo owns a nursery on more-than-600-acre Bowyer Farm in Warren County to grow most of its flora, as well as nearly 10,000 trees, all of which make up animal habitats and gardens.
Landscaping these spaces at the zoo first requires trees, then screening to obscure buildings and fence lines from view. “After that, it’s beauty,” says Foltz. And what makes a habitat beautiful? At the zoo, it’s about making visitors feel like they’re in the wild with the animal, which means finding native plants that mimic what you would see in its country of origin.
Take Elephant Trek: “It’s Asian Indian. When you think of that area, you’re thinking more tropical-looking, and obviously we can grow very few tropicals here,” says Foltz. “What we try to do is get things like bigleaf magnolia, which is native to Ohio and is the largest leaf plant in the U.S. We use it like it’s tropical, so we put in hundreds … look at all the bamboo, the catalpa in the right spots, which looks like a teak tree in India.” In comparison, African habitats use more grasses and fine-textured plants, while North American ones feature woodland trees like sugar maples, oaks, and hollies.
The Cincinnati Zoo’s corpse flower (nicknamed Morticia) was gifted by the Chicago Botanic Garden in 2019 to live in the Discovery Forest. Native to the jungles of Sumatra, Indonesia, the rare and massive flower is said to smell like “sweaty feet, Limburger cheese, and garlic” when it blooms.
Illustration by Emi Villavicencio
The botanical gardens are about more than just beauty, though—science takes place among the trees and flowers every day. The zoo runs trials with a variety of plants to record what pests and pollinators they attract as part of its Annual Trials Program and various pollinator initiatives. The findings are sent to nurseries, businesses, and homeowners across the country for industry and public use so people can make the most informed choices about what plants they want in their landscaping.
“We watch pollinators on what’s blooming, and that’s how we found a rare northern golden bumblebee on two of our plants,” says Foltz. “We probably wouldn’t have found it if we weren’t looking at what’s visiting. So those plants have a little bit more importance to us.”
Its multifaceted approach to horticulture is what earned the Cincinnati Zoo & Botanical Gardens a level IV accreditation by ArbNet and the Morton Arboretum—the only arboretum within a zoo to do so in the world.
And having such a diverse array of plant material at all times means that the zoo doesn’t have to use insecticides to maintain its lush oasis. “There are so many flowering plants that they are controlling our [pest] populations, and that’s a strategy that homeowners can use,” says Foltz. “That’s kind of the message, that having that mix of planting layers helps incorporate wildlife habitat in the urban landscape.”
Right as he says so, a hummingbird flies over our heads and sticks its beak into a nearby flower, the blue salvia. Passersby cry out and stop to take pictures. “This is planting with a purpose,” says Foltz. “Some people say annuals are a waste of time. Well, that hummingbird sure liked that annual, and we sure got excited to see it. Those are the things that we, as an institution, want to share with our community.”
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