Nature Exhibits

Visitors will be invited to experience, and to engage with their environment. The exhibits are designed to fit into their surroundings, and reflect the encompassing habitat. Learning about nature through our exhibits is both an active and sensory experience that combines scientific investigation with emotional connections. Content is accessible and relevant to all ages, cultures, and learning styles. We hope our exhibits inspire exploration in nature!

Designed to blend with its surroundings, our Wetlands Exhibit is constructed of branches woven through a painted aluminum superstructure. Visitors walking on one of our Water Garden paths find themselves entering a woven tunnel that opens up into a spacious enclosure. Once inside, they find interactive panels with colorful images, clues and information about the plants, animals, and natural systems around them. Windows in the exhibit open into the surrounding wetland.

Sponsored by Mountain Rose Herbs

Our Incense-cedar Exhibit highlights a forest full of life, and invites a deeper investigation of the dynamic forces that shape the forest. Stories at either end of the trail provide glimpses into the ecology of the forest, and cues for further exploration as we provide the tools to see the forest in a different way. At the center of the trail, an expansive circular deck provides a spot for quiet observation and further learning.

The Oak Woodlands exhibit investigates how seasonal changes create surprising interactions between species which find a home in and among the Oregon white oaks. It invites discovery with interactive elements that allow visitors to engage in kinesthetic learning. The centerpiece of the exhibit is a 10-foot-tall metal tree sculpture with a crank, which when turned, emulates the change in canopy cover through the seasons, and rotates stories of how the changes in light affect the ecosystem. Near the tree are four smaller “satellite” exhibits, providing for deeper learning experiences.

This exhibit consists of two meditative paths with scattered vignettes that share some of the cultural and ecological outcomes of regular burning. These paths converge in the center around a planter showcasing a number of native plants that were important traditional food sources, and which benefited from regular burning. A bench encircles the outer half of the planter, offering expansive views of the savanna and a chance to pause and reflect on the statement embedded in stone at one’s feet, “the oak savanna will not exist without humans.”   

The exhibit explores the intersection of human culture and the natural environment through the story of how the native Kalapuya people managed the land in the Willamette Valley for millennia, and how their use of fire as a management tool ensured the existence of a biodiverse community—one which is now at risk of disappearing. This exhibit celebrates the oak savanna as a cultural landscape and aims to honor these ancestral Kalapuyan lands and the life that thrived in the savanna.