Cloud Gardens or "Bay Adelaide Gardens and the Cloud Forest Conservatory" is a small park in downtown Toronto

Toronto

Toronto is the provincial capital of Ontario and the largest city in Canada. It is located in Southern Ontario on the northwestern shore of Lake Ontario. A relatively modern city, Toronto's history dates back to the late-18th century, when its land was first purchased by the British monarchy from...

. It is on Richmond Street just east of Bay Street

Bay Street

Bay Street, originally known as Bear Street, is a major thoroughfare in Downtown Toronto. It is the centre of Toronto's Financial District and is often used by metonymy to refer to Canada's financial industry since succeeding Montreal's St. James Street in that role in the 1970s...

 on half an acre (2,000 m²) of land.

Origin

The site was given to the city in the 1980s as part of a deal that allowed the Bay Adelaide Centre to be higher than official plan limits. The developers thus gave a small portion of the lot to the city and spent $5 million to build a park.

Design

The park is one of the more elaborate in Toronto. It was designed by a partnership of Baird, Sampson Neuert Architects, the MBTW Group/Watchorn Architects, and two artists, Margaret Priest and Tony Sherman. It won George Baird a Governor General's Architecture Award.

Description

The western part of the park includes a network of pathways and is edged by cluster of trees around a semicircular lawn. The eastern portion is more elaborate with a series of walkways climbing past a waterfall

Waterfall

A waterfall is a place where flowing water rapidly drops in elevation as it flows over a steep region or a cliff.-Formation:Waterfalls are commonly formed when a river is young. At these times the channel is often narrow and deep. When the river courses over resistant bedrock, erosion happens...

. Rising above this area is a monument to Toronto's construction workers designed by Margaret Priest and constructed by the Building Trades Union. It comprises squares that each illustrate one of the building trades. Thus one shows a network of steel rebars, another, a cluster of wiring.

The namesake feature of the Gardens is a small greenhouse

Greenhouse

A greenhouse is a building in which plants are grown. These structures range in size from small sheds to very large buildings...

set to the cool and moist conditions of certain mountain ecologies. A walkway runs from the lower-level entrance to an upper-level exit by the waterfall.
Occasionally, parkour teams of Toronto will train here.