Kyoto Prefectural Botanical Garden Acorn Forest "Dongreen Lab"

Kyoto Prefectural Botanical Garden opened in 1924 as Japan's first public botanical garden, and will celebrate its 100th anniversary on January 1, 2024. To mark the occasion, the garden has developed a new acorn forest area called "Dongreen Lab." The area to be developed is a 3,000 square meter area in the center of the garden, where more than 10 types of acorn trees, including acorn-bearing oaks and chestnut trees, from around the world are collected.
The park has a bear-shaped "acorn post" where children can actually pick up acorns and feel their shape and smell, and "highlight captions" that allow children to feel the diversity of acorns, allowing them to learn about ecosystems while touching various types of acorns. The acorns that are collected will also be used in workshops within the park and as gifts for the bears at Kyoto City Zoo.

They wanted to create a new area where people could learn about plants while interacting with them, in preparation for the next 100 years, and we consulted on technical aspects such as what methods they could use.

In developing the Acorn Forest area, we responded to the desire to foster a formative experience at the botanical garden through play by proposing mechanisms that would allow children to actually pick up acorns and a space that would make them want to enter the area, and we were able to gain sympathy. In addition, by dividing up the parts that could be developed directly by the botanical garden and the parts that our company was responsible for, we were able to reduce the project budget, and the budget from Kyoto Prefecture was included, and after bidding, we were able to realize the development of the new area.

The cuteness and lovability of the Acorn Post Bear "Don-chan" has made it extremely popular with children. The area has been developed to focus on the plants that the garden treasures, while also creating a sophisticated atmosphere that has not been seen in botanical gardens before.