Inverness Botanic Gardens – Glasshouses and Lunch
A few hours.
The route
Inverness Botanic Gardens are a little world of their own on the edge of town, with a steamy Tropical House of palms, bananas and a waterfall pond, and a Cactus House full of spines and flowers.
They're free, and Café Botanics beside the glasshouses serves soup, sandwiches and homemade cakes. It's an easy few hours, good with grandparents and on a grey day.
Before you go
Book accommodation nearby
If you are staying over: here are ours nearest where the day starts and ends.
The nearest of ours is Newhall Mains in Balblair, 14 miles away.
The day
Inverness
A slow, warm morning among the glasshouses and the borders outside, with lunch a few steps from the plants and the car.
About two and a half hours
Inverness Botanic Gardens
An attraction
The Botanic Gardens are on Bught Lane, beside the Inverness Leisure Centre. There are blue badge spaces by the café door, and everyone else parks in the leisure centre's car park next door. The gardens are free and open every day from 9.30am to 4pm. Inside, the Tropical House is warm and green, with coffee, banana and ginger plants and a waterfall tumbling into a pond of carp and goldfish, and the Cactus House runs straight on from it. Outside are borders, an orchard and a lawn. Allow an hour to an hour and a half. The way in has a ramp and automatic doors, and a wheelchair can be borrowed, but the two glasshouses have split levels with steps, and the paths outside are bark, grass and gravel.
Café Botanics
Lunch
Lunch is in Café Botanics, by the entrance, so there is nothing to walk to. It serves breakfast rolls, soup, sandwiches and toasties, cakes and traybakes and hot drinks, with kids' lunch boxes, and you sit in a glasshouse or in a snug with a fire. It's open every day with the gardens, 9.30am to 4pm, with last orders at 3.45pm, and there's no need to book. It has automatic doors and an accessible toilet with baby changing.
If it rains
The Tropical House, the Cactus House and the café are all under glass or a roof, so only the borders outside are lost to rain.
Where to stay