Parkville is Melbourne's green institutional suburb, immediately north-west of the city centre and named for the enormous wedge of public parkland that defines it. Royal Park — one of the largest open spaces in inner Melbourne — fills much of the suburb with grassland, sports fields, and the indigenous-planted Australian Garden, and it is here that Melbourne Zoo, the country's oldest, sits among the gum trees. On a fine day the park is full of joggers, dog-walkers, and weekend cricket, and the tram out from the city makes it an easy escape from the grid.
Around the parkland edges, Parkville is a quiet residential suburb of tree-lined streets and well-kept Victorian terraces, with the major institutions clustered along its southern and eastern flanks — the University of Melbourne, the Royal Children's Hospital, and the biomedical research precinct. It has little of the café-and-bar buzz of neighbouring Carlton, but for the zoo and the parkland it is one of the city's essential green destinations.