The Landscape Lab GATEway Garden, located in the Hunt Hall courtyard, serves as a living laboratory for landscape architecture students. Every fall, students design and build a new feature for the courtyard, resulting in a demonstration garden of innovative materials, regionally appropriate plants, and a variety of environmentally friendly building techniques.

The UC Davis Arboretum and Public Garden’s Hummingbird GATEway Garden was created in partnership with the UC Davis Hummingbird Health and Conservation Program to not only exhibit the many species of plants that attract and create a good habitat for local varieties of hummingbirds, but also to educate visitors about the importance of the hummingbird population and the work being done at UC Davis to support them.

The Arboretum GATEway Garden is a connection point between the UC Davis campus and the City of Davis, showcasing local native plants in a striking modernist design. The garden celebrates our local natural and cultural heritage, with plants that are native to our local region (within 20 miles of this site). 

The UC Davis Horticulture Innovation Lab Demonstration Center — a place where students, faculty, and staff can test new horticultural tools and demonstrate best practices for growing fruits and vegetables, particularly those helpful to small-scale farmers in developing countries.

UC Davis GATEways Project

The UC Davis GATEways Project (Gardens, Arts, and The Environment) is a master planning framework for the Arboretum and Public Garden that envisions the campus landscape as a portal into the campus, to welcome visitors and showcase the creative work and spirit of inquiry at UC Davis.

With the GATEways Project, the Arboretum and Public Garden continues its work as a national leader in the public garden field while also adopting a new mission — to inform visitors about the important ideas and complex issues UC Davis scientists and scholars are tackling.

The UC Davis Nature’s Gallery mural is a stunning work of art composed of over 140 colorful ceramic tiles—hand-crafted by students, staff, faculty, and community members—each depicting diverse drought-tolerant plants or insects found in the Arboretum’s Ruth Risdon Storer Garden.

Dedicated in November 2011, the Native American Contemplative Garden is an outdoor reflective space honoring the original people who once lived on the land that would become the University of California, Davis. The Native American Contemplative Garden is part of the UC Davis Project to Honor Native Americans - believed to be the first project of its kind at any public university in the nation to honor the land's original inhabitants and to educate the campus and its visitors about them.

The Biological Orchard and Garden (BOG) is a hub for outdoor learning. The drought-tolerant plants that grow there are all from Mediterranean regions with similar summer-dry climates as Davis, including the Mediterranean, South Africa, Chile and Australia. The beds demonstrate the diversity of plants that can grow in the Sacramento Valley and provide students and campus visitors with a variety of species to observe and study.

The California Rock Garden (a Geology GATEway Garden) was developed in partnership with faculty, staff and students from the Department of Earth and Planetary Sciences, UC Davis Finance, Operations and Administration, the Office of Campus Planning and Environmental Stewardship and the UC Davis Arboretum and Public Garden. It displays boulders and core samples representative of various geologic features in California in addition to California native plants that are part of the UC Davis Arboretum All-Stars program.