The Garden of Tomorrow: A Long Promise 

Norfolk Botanical Garden began in 1938 beside Little Creek Reservoir, where African American workers transformed what appeared to be unremarkable land into a garden of 1,000 azaleas through the Works Progress Administration. Their labor did more than change the ground; it gave Norfolk a new way of seeing what that ground could become.

In the decades that followed, the Garden continued to unfold. Paths wandered beneath trees and along the water, making room for an experience that felt at once close to home and far beyond the everyday. More than 60 distinct gardens now inhabit its 175 acres, yet its deepest appeal has remained remarkably constant. Some places announce themselves in color. Others emerge slowly, around a bend or beneath a change in canopy. Generations have come here with the same hopeful instinct: to follow the path and see what might be waiting around the corner.

The Garden of Tomorrow carries that instinct forward. What began in 2020 as a conversation about a new boathouse widened into the largest expansion in the Garden’s history, opening September 12, 2026. As the pandemic made the human need for living landscapes newly visible and the increasing costs of meeting this need, the work had to respond.

Dills understood that the real question was how the Garden could grow without losing the intimacy, surprise, and freedom that made people love it in the first place. 

That distinction became the project’s compass. Growth alone was not success; the Garden had to become more capable without becoming more institutional in feeling. Dills approached each decision with a quiet but demanding aim: sustain more life, welcome more people, and support more ambitious work without allowing the systems required to do so to eclipse the wonder. The work required seeing those needs as interconnected and allowing the answer to evolve while the essential promise remained clear.

In the Brock Parking Garden, what looks like landscape is also infrastructure; what performs as infrastructure becomes part of the Garden. 

The Garden now begins before a visitor gets out of their car. Instead of treating parking as the necessary interruption before the experience, the design makes arrival part of the living landscape. Rain settles into planted gardens and filters through permeable paving, staying close to where it falls and getting cleaner rather than rushing toward the reservoir and the Chesapeake Bay watershed with all the silt it can carry. This reduces runoff by approximately 40 percent and avoids the two-acre stormwater pond a conventional lot would have required.

That single shift made room for the buildings at the heart of the expansion while increasing vehicle capacity from roughly 400 to 600 cars. More than 100 new trees—about three times the original number—are projected to create ten times the canopy coverage, gradually turning an exposed arrival into one shaped by shade, and lowering summer surface temperatures by an estimated 20 to 45 degrees.

Even the landscape that had to change was treated as habitat, not empty ground. Before an existing stormwater basin had to be drained, Garden staff and volunteers gathered the fish, turtles, ducks, and other animals living there and carried them to the adjacent reservoir. It was a small migration within the Garden, and a telling one: making room for what comes next began by noticing what was already alive. 

The Brock Entry Pavilion gives the Garden’s mission physical form by removing barriers—real and perceived—between human life and plant life.

There is no sealed lobby announcing that the landscape has been left behind. Glass holds sky, trees, and changing light in view, so eating, gathering, or simply finding one’s way happens in the continued presence of the Garden. Overhead, the nearly 15,000-square-foot Batten Sky Meadow turns the roof into living ground. It holds rain where it falls, offers habitat, softens the noise from the nearby airport, and sends food grown there to The Reeds Bistro below. The building does not merely face the Garden; it participates in its life. 

That relationship is felt in subtle details that reveal themselves gradually. The sounds outside travel through the pavilion glass, carried by nearly invisible transducers, while interior light shifts with the color of the day. A fallen tree, once beloved by a Garden board member, returns as a countertop touched by thousands of visitors. Beyond the glass, a wildlife pond cleans stormwater while making room for animals—including a groundhog that took up residence during construction. None of these moments asks to be admired on its own. Together, they make the architecture feel less like an object placed in the Garden than another living participant in it. 

From the pavilion, the path rises 22 feet into the old-growth canopy. The ground falls away. Branches, leaves, and the rose garden come into a new relationship, and the conservatory appears ahead through the trees. Even here, an unseen decision carries the mission forward: the decking is made entirely from recycled plastic grocery bags, giving a material designed for brief use a long second life. The experience is expansive; the choices beneath it are exacting. 

Crossing into the 26,000-square-foot Perry Conservatory is a journey between worlds.

Warmth, moisture, texture, and scent gather in the Tropical House. In the Arid House, plants reveal the strange and beautiful forms life takes when water is scarce. Many are rare or endangered, held here as part of a living ark for species increasingly vulnerable to climate change. Their survival depends on exact control of temperature, humidity, light, water, and air, yet the machinery of that care recedes. What visitors meet first is life—close enough to study, wonder at, and remember. 

CHIHULY: The Perry Collection heightens that attention. Glass forms appear among leaves, spines, shadow, and reflected light, drawing art lovers toward plants and inviting plant lovers to see familiar forms anew. Even the conservatory transparency carries more than one meaning: it keeps the surrounding Garden present for visitors, while patterned glazing makes the building visible to birds and reduces the risk of collision. Beauty and protection are held in the same surface. 

In the Brock Environmental Education Center, discovery becomes understanding, and understanding becomes the first step in environmental stewardship.

At the Environmental Education Center, wonder is given somewhere to go. A leaf, root, seed, or unexpected change noticed in the Garden can be carried into a classroom, greenhouse, nursery, or laboratory and examined more closely. Younger children, teenagers, horticulturists, and researchers may enter with different questions, but each begins in the same place: attention to something alive. 

A visitor will never see the full weight of the decisions behind this experience—and that is part of its success. 

Leadership on a project this fluid did not mean defending a fixed answer. It meant knowing what could change and what could not. Through years of design and construction, Dills kept testing new demands against the Garden’s central promise, adjusting program, systems, and details without allowing the experience to fragment. Each choice altered another: the movement of water determined what land could become; the admission of light affected plants, people, and birds; the way a material weathered shaped both the story it told and the work of caring for it. Stewardship meant following those consequences all the way through, so the Garden could feel not complicated, but whole. 

For Clay Dills, that wholeness is rooted in childhood visits with his grandmother and siblings. He remembers the Garden as enormous, and magical. Because the garden was surrounded by water, there was unfettered confidence in their movement knowing they couldn’t get lost. They followed unfamiliar paths drawn onward by the promise of uncovering a new secret around the next corner.

That memory became a test for the design: the Garden should never reveal itself all at once. Paths rise and turn; views narrow and open; planting and art offer glimpses before arrival. The same care extended to choices visitors may never consciously register. Gerrie West, the lead project architect, confidently approved the recycled paper-and-resin material for the ticket counter because she had tested its durability herself – leaving a sample submerged outdoors in her yard for a year. The experiment was humble, almost stubborn, but the consequences mattered. A material chosen for its environmental promise also had to withstand thousands of hands and many years of public use.  

Nearly ninety years later, the audacity of that first act lies not only in what it made, but in what it set in motion. 

The Garden of Tomorrow allows the Garden to keep becoming—protecting vulnerable life while leaving room for surprise. Its promise is the one Clay and Gerrie felt as children and generations of visitors have followed ever since: the path continues beyond what can be seen and beckons you to keep going, keep looking, keep finding. 

Year Completed

Size

Location

Collaborators

DA Project Team

Focus Areas

Services