Tickets

All visitors who aren’t members must buy a general admission ticket.

Hours
9am–5pm daily


Ancient Forest

Dinosaur garden stroll

Prehistoric plants

Descanso Gardens’ Ancient Forest is teeming with prehistoric plants from an age when dinosaurs wandered the world and the Earth’s oceans and continents looked vastly different from today.

Oldest plant species on the planet

Some of the ancient plant species that persist today survived millions of years relatively unchanged even as the geography and animal life around them experienced dramatic shifts. Descanso’s cycads give our visitors a peek at some of the earliest types of flora on Earth.

See it on our map

Did you know?

Many of the plants in this region evolved well before flowers. In fact, flowering plants are “newbies” in the plant world — they first appeared in the Jurassic period about 175 million years ago.

Plant list

See a list of our Ancient Forest plants