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It’s a natural gem hidden in the heart of the city, a more than century-old park with a storied past.

As of this week, Calgary’s Reader Rock Garden is also a national historic site, an honour bestowed upon it by the federal government.

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The National Historic Designation, given to people, places and events that have shaped Canada, has 12 recipients this year, everything from the Stratford Festival and the Dionne quintuplets, to Calgary’s inner-city park just across the road from the Calgary Stampede’s south gate.

The park came to life in 1913 when William Roland Reader, the city’s superintendent from that year until 1942, lived in a house at the top of what was first a nondescript hill on the northern slope of Union Cemetery.

Reader, an avid horticulturalist, experimented with more than 4,000 different plant species, an activity that began decades of what Donna Balzer, a noted Calgary horticulturalist and author, calls a “cross pollination of plants around the world.”