A Plant Maze Opens at the Virginia Aquarium

The Virginia Aquarium & Marine Science Center opens Mission Botanica on Saturday, October 4, an indoor maze built around plants and the things that climb, pollinate and live on them. Members get in a day early, on Friday, October 3. The exhibit runs through January 10, 2027.

It was created by Minotaur Mazes, and it is a climbing exhibit rather than a looking one. Guests scale a spider web to protect a garden, leap across the rings of a giant redwood, and ride a zipline the way a bee carries pollen between flowers. There are question-and-answer challenges on plant diversity scattered through the route, and a replica of a corpse flower to pose beside.

Why an aquarium is doing plants

The framing is that more than 400,000 plant species are found worldwide and that animals and people depend on all of them for food, shelter and the rest. For an institution whose usual subject is a water column, it is a reasonable stretch: the aquarium’s own animals are sitting at the top of food webs that start with photosynthesis.

The exhibit is included with admission and is fully funded by the Virginia Aquarium Foundation, the nonprofit that procures and maintains the aquarium’s exhibits and animals and underwrites its stranding response and research work. The aquarium is owned by the City of Virginia Beach and runs as a city department in partnership with the Foundation.

A note on the corpse flower

The aquarium describes the corpse flower replica as the world’s largest flower. The plant usually meant by that name is the titan arum, Amorphophallus titanum, and the record it actually holds is a slightly different one. Kew puts it precisely: the titan arum’s own flowers are very small, and they group into a massive flowering structure, an inflorescence, that can reach three meters tall. It is the world’s largest unbranched inflorescence rather than the world’s largest single flower.

The distinction is worth a sentence on a label, because it is the more interesting fact. The thing a visitor is looking at is not one enormous bloom but hundreds of tiny ones stacked on a stalk taller than the person standing next to it. The smell, which Kew describes as an incredibly foul smell of rotten flesh, is real and lasts a single evening, which is why a replica is the sensible thing to put in a maze children walk through for three months.

For the smallest visitors

Toddler Meet & Move runs inside the exhibit on Wednesday mornings starting October 7, which is the aquarium acknowledging that a two-year-old and a nine-year-old want very different things from a climbing maze.

Is Mission Botanica included with admission?

Yes. There is no separate ticket. It is open from October 4 through January 10, 2027, with a member preview on October 3.

Mission Botanica takes the slot that Wildlife Rescue: Second Chance at Survival held from June to September, and that exhibit was also built to be climbed on rather than read. Twice in one year is a pattern, and on a wet Saturday in Virginia Beach it is a good instinct.