Pinjor Garden

Location

Chandigarh Shimla highway, 20 kms from Chandigarh at Pinjore, Haryana

Accessibility

Bus Services, Cabs – Easily reachable by road.

Visit Timings

 7:00 AM to 10 PM. *Timings are subject to vary.

Garden Ticket Fee

Rs 20 per person. The Garden Fee is subject to change.
Chandigarh,  is surrounded by numerous beautiful places that serve as ideal destinations for excursions. The Pinjore Garden is one of those  places that has emerged as an important tourist attraction that one can visit when on a holiday to this city or is going towards from Chandigarh to Shimla.
Chandigarh Pinjore Gardens, also called Yadavindra Gardens are 20 km from Chandigarh, 15 km from Panchkula, on the Chandigarh Shimla national highway number 21. Taxis and buses ply regularly between Pinjore, Kalka, Panchkula and Chandigarh. 
The fascinating Mughal Garden (now popularly called Pinjore Garden) cover a total area of 100 acres. A mini zoo, plants nursery, a Japanese garden, historic palaces and picnic lawns await tourists. Especially at weekends, fountains are switched on and after dusk, lights pick up the beauty of the palaces by night.
Nawab Fadai Khan, a great architect and foster brother of the Mughal emperor Aurangzeb is said to have designed the idyllic gardens. He planned the Gardens on the classical Charbagh pattern, giving the area a central water way. Both sides of this waterway were covered with patches of green bordered with flowers and shaded by trees. He supervised the construction of the stylistic Sheesh Mahal (palace of glass), the Rang Mahal (painted palace), and the cube-like Jal Mahal (palace of water).
Like other Mughal gardens, this one also has a sloping ground and is decorated with fountains and grand and beautiful pavilions. There is a channel of water in the middle of the garden. The fountains are located inside this channel of water. There are walkways located on both sides of the channel.
Lined with huge trees and a stretch of green grass, these walkways add to the beauty, charm and elegance of the Pinjore Garden. If you walk straight down, you will arrive at a huge pavilion, which offers marvelous view of the entire garden. The pavilion also has a terrace with a water body located in the center.
Special programs are arranged at the Yadavindra Gardens for the Baisakhi (spring) festival in April and for the Mango Festival in June and July. The gardens have cool, shady walks and flagged pathways which run to the outer reaches of the creeper-covered walls. The end structure of the doorway has recently been made into a disc-like open-air theatre.

Rose Garden

Location: Sector 10, Chandigarh

Highlights: botanical garden
 
Zakir Hussain Rose Garden, is a botanical garden located in Chandigarh, India and spread over 30 acres (120,000 m²) of land,with 50,000 rose-bushes of 1600 different species. Named after India's former president, Zakir Hussain and created in 1967 under the guidance of Dr M.S. Randhawa, Chandigarh's first chief commissioner, the garden has the distinction of being Asia's largest.The garden has not only roses, but also trees of medicinal value. Some of the medicinal plants that can be spotted here are bel, bahera, harar, camphor and yellow gulmohar. The rose plants have been planted in carved-out lawns and flower beds.

Apart from serving as a host of other events, the Zakir Rose Garden serves as the venue for hosting the annual Festival of Gardens, a major cultural event of the city during the month of March. Celebrated mainly as a tribute to the magnificence of the rose itself, the attractions include food, drinks, joyrides, and contests of varying nature, such as photography, gardening, landscaping, bonsai, and Rose Prince and Princess. The contests are open to the residents or institutions from nearby places.

Rock Garden

Location: in Sector 1 between the Capitol Complex and Sukhna Lake

Highlights: exquisite artwork made from industrial and urban waste

The Rock Garden or Rock Garden of Chandigarh is a Sculpture garden in Chandigarh, India, also known as Nek Chand's Rock Garden after its founder Nek Chand, a government official who started the garden secretly in his spare time in 1957. Today it is spread over an area of forty-acres (160,000 m²), it is completely built of industrial & home waste and thrown-away items.

The garden is most famous for its sculptures made from recycled ceramic

Waterfall at Rock Garden, Chandigarh

It is situated near Sukhna Lake. It consists of man-made interlinked waterfalls and many other sculptures that have been made of scrap & other kinds of wastes (bottles, glasses, bangles, tiles, ceramic pots, sinks, electrical waste, etc) which are placed in walled paths.

In his spare time, Chand began collecting materials from demolition sites around the city. He recycled these materials into his own vision of the divine kingdom of Sukrani, choosing a gorge in a forest near Sukhna Lake for his work. The gorge had been designated as a land conservancy, a forest buffer established in 1902 that nothing could be built on. Chand’s work was illegal, but he was able to hide it for eighteen years before it was discovered by the authorities in 1975. By this time, it had grown into a 12-acre (49,000 m²) complex of interlinked courtyards, each filled with hundreds of pottery-covered concrete sculptures of dancers, musicians, and animals.

His work was in serious danger of being demolished, but he was able to get public opinion on his side, and in 1976 the park was inaugurated as a public space. Nek Chand was given a salary, a title ("Sub-Divisional Engineer, Rock Garden"), and a workforce of 50 laborers so that he could concentrate full-time on his work. It even appeared on an Indian stamp in 1983. The Rock Garden is still made out of recycled materials; and with the government’s help, Chand was able to set up collection centers around the city for waste, especially rags and broken ceramics.

When Chand left the country on a lecture tour in 1996, the city withdrew its funding, and vandals attacked the park. The Rock Garden Society took over the administration and upkeep of this unique visionary environment. The garden is visited by over five thousand people daily, with a total of more than twelve million visitors since its inception.