When Your Client Eats Your Design: Notes from a Zoo Exhibit Designer

In today’s zoos, visitors expect to see animals in lush, natural-looking habitats. A “wild” environment not only enhances animal welfare but also makes it easier to communicate conservation messages. Sounds simple enough, until you try to pull it off.

Designers have learned, often the hard way over the last century, that replicating a natural ecosystem inside a zoo is almost impossible. The first problem? Plants and animals rarely make good roommates. Whether it’s elephants or turtles, animals have a knack for dismantling even the most thoughtfully curated landscaping. Sometimes, the vegetation doesn’t even last a week before it’s trampled, uprooted, or taste-tested.

And even if the animals play nice, the plants might not. Not all species can adapt to the lighting, temperature, or humidity conditions of an artificial habitat. That’s why successful zoo landscaping isn’t just about copying nature, it’s about carefully crafting a durable illusion that works for animals, staff, and guests alike. It’s a balancing act where creativity is not optional, it’s the whole job.

How much of the greenery in today’s zoo & aquarium exhibits is real—and how much is expertly faked? Photo taken at the National Museum of Marine Biology and Aquarium, Taiwan.

Keep the Plants Safe (From Your Clients)

One of the golden rules in zoo landscaping: “Don’t let animals touch the plants.” That could mean installing planters just out of reach, wrapping tree trunks with protective padding, or even running electric fences and wires, some shaped like a blade of grass, to maintain the illusion of wilderness. It’s a classic move in zoo design: keep the greenery where the guests can see it, and where the animals can’t destroy it.

In exhibits for large primates, trees are often ringed with electric wires for protection, while separate climbing structures fulfill the animals’ physical and behavioral needs. In other words, some plants are for show; enrichment is engineered separately.

This also explains why pig exhibits often look suspiciously barren, either completely stripped of greenery or sparsely decorated with survivors like night-scented lilies or palm trees. Why? Because pigs have a talent for turning lush landscapes into salad bars. Landscapers quickly learn that unless a plant is armored or offensive to a pig’s palate, it won’t last long.

It’s like building a fancy set for a very picky, very destructive actor.

Electric wires are installed around the plants in the gorilla exhibit to help the them survive their enthusiastic cohabitants. Photo taken at the Bronx Zoo.

Fake Plants, Real Drama

Thanks to modern materials, fake flora has entered its golden age. Zoos now use artificial giant kelp, trees with buttress roots, and even sculpted coral reefs to evoke exotic ecosystems that real plants couldn’t survive in.

Faux plants are stronger, easier to maintain, and (let’s be honest) often look better than the real thing. Artists study ideal specimens, sculpt detailed prototypes, and cast them with precision to get every vein and texture just right. The results are so good, most guests don’t realize they’re not looking at real ferns clinging to that towering rainforest tree.

In fact, many rainforest exhibits you’ve admired are full of carefully placed synthetic vines and ferns, blended so artfully with real ones that you’d swear you were in the jungle. And the same goes for many aquarium corals and kelp forests, they're often pure set dressing.

The wild might be impossible to copy, but the atmosphere of the wild? That we can design.

Artificial plants help recreate the landscape of the East African highlands for zoo visitors. Photo taken at Zurich Zoo.

Local Plants, Global Stories

Zoos may be telling stories of distant ecosystems, but that doesn’t mean they must ship in plants from halfway across the world. In fact, they usually don’t.

Instead, designers cleverly use local species as ecological stand-ins, plants that survive better in the region’s climate but still evoke the original landscape. For instance, Taipei Zoo, located in a rainy subtropical zone, uses hoop pines from Australia to mimic the look and feel of a North American conifer forest.

It’s not botanical authenticity that matters; it’s the illusion of the right environment, delivered through smart substitutions.

Hoop pines from Australia stand in for conifers from high-latitude forests for North American exhibits. Photo taken at Taipei Zoo.

Also in theme parks, climate-appropriate plants are used to evoke a Nordic environment on the Isle of Berk. Photo taken at Universal Epic Universe.

The Stage is Never Really Finished

Designing an animal exhibit isn’t just about sketching a plan and calling it a day. Once built, designers must observe how animals interact with the space, how keepers operate within it, and how visitors experience it. It’s a cycle of trial, error, and adjustment.

Just because you’ve spent a fortune on rockwork doesn’t mean the animals care. Good design balances animal welfare, staff functionality, and cost, and sometimes that means skipping fancy landscaping altogether in favor of modular enrichments that can change with the seasons (or the moods of the residents).

So next time you visit the zoo, slow down and take a closer look: which parts are built for the creatures who call it home, and which ones are there just for your eyes (or your camera lens)? But every detail is thoughtfully placed to bring you a little closer to nature.

This primate exhibit abandons the illusion of nature in favor of a flexible, function-first design. Aesthetically “unnatural,” perhaps—but it may better serve animal welfare. Photo taken at Berlin Zoo (West Berlin).