The 60-hectare site on the southern shore of the Weerwater hosted the Floriade 2022, the once-a-decade Dutch horticultural world expo. The theme was Growing Green Cities and the site was laid out as a grid of garden plots — one for every letter of the alphabet — with a wooden food forest, a cable car, and pavilions from forty countries.
After the expo closed, the site was renamed the Hortus and is being gradually rebuilt as a new mixed-use district, but the international gardens, the food forest and the central arboretum survive as a public park. It is a strange, slightly melancholy place — half botanical garden, half construction site — and a fine place to walk on a sunny afternoon.