Toronto's most beloved formal garden — 35 acres of English-style gardens along a ravine, with bridges, streams, and seasonal plantings that are spectacular from spring through fall. Connects to the Wilket Creek Park ravine trail system.
Neighbourhood: North York · Address: 755 Lawrence Ave E, Toronto, ON · Hours: Mon–Sun 10:00 AM – 8:30 PM · Phone: (416) 392-8188
Why Visit
Edwards Gardens features 35 meticulously maintained acres of gardens, streams, and bridges that feel a world away from city life. It's a photogenic retreat with floral displays changing dramatically from spring bulbs to autumn foliage.
What Makes It Unique
Unlike Toronto's other green spaces, Edwards Gardens is a true formal garden with winding paths, classic English design, and plenty of spots to pause by running water. The gardens blend seamlessly into an extensive ravine trail network, so you can switch from cultivated blooms to wild creekside walks in minutes.
Edwards Gardens is Toronto's most beloved formal garden — a 16-hectare gem in North York that combines the structured beauty of English garden design with the natural drama of a ravine setting, creating an environment that rewards every season from the spring tulip display through summer perennials, fall colour in the tree canopy, and the bare-branch architectural clarity of winter. The Toronto Botanical Garden shares the property's eastern edge, adding 17 themed specialty gardens to what is already one of the finest green spaces in the city.
The garden was established in the early 1950s on land donated to the City of Toronto, and the design reflects the high English garden tradition of the post-war era: herbaceous borders, rose gardens, a water feature series of rapids and cascades along Wilket Creek, and specimen trees of considerable age and scale. The ravine setting gives the garden a topographic interest that flat formal gardens lack — paths descend through the garden levels, crossing small bridges over the creek and climbing back through plantings that shift character as the elevation changes.
In spring, Edwards Gardens is one of the best places in Toronto to see tulips — thousands of them in the formal beds from late April through May. The rose garden peaks in June and July. Perennial borders maintain colour from May through September. The tree canopy, which includes mature beeches, oaks, and maples planted in the early days of the garden, turns extraordinary shades of yellow and red in mid-October.
Adjacent to the Toronto Botanical Garden, which offers 17 specialty gardens including a fragrance garden, a water garden, and a productive kitchen garden. The combination of the two institutions makes the area a full horticultural destination. Both are free. The surrounding neighbourhood — Bridle Path, Sunnybrook, and Lawrence Park — is worth exploring if the urge to walk further strikes after the gardens.