The SMP6 Town Botanical Gardens are now OPEN! This project contains exactly one-and-a-half residences: 12097 and part of 12098. (I'm still using half of 12098 for an acacia tree farm and a private village.) Special thanks to chickeneer for the road edit to make this work! The exterior design is based off of the Palace Garden in the Minecraft Construction Handbook, which is something I've wanted to build for a very long time! I used diorite instead of quartz blocks (the former of which didn't exist when the book was written) to cut the cost in half and give it a more natural earthy feel that retains the modern white coloration, though. The interior garden has several very special areas, shown with signs: Old Growth Taiga: This is exactly what it says it is: based off of the Old Growth Taiga biome with towering spruce trees. It does contain elements of the Flower Forest biome with abundant wildflowers, though. Oak-Birch Forest: This is based off of the Flower Forest biome, which contains oak and birch trees like the standard Forest biome but has a wider variety of wildflowers than anywhere else and occurs in the middle of arid temperate Plains. Windswept Forest: This has a few oak but mostly spruce trees and is next to a rocky area, so it could be based off of the Windswept Forest biome if not for the flat terrain. Again, it does contain elements of the Flower Forest. Dark Forest: This is based off of the Dark Forest Biome but once again contains elements of the Flower Forest biome. Dripstone Glades: This is loosely based off of the calcareous "cedar" glades in and near the Tennessean Nashville, Murfreesboro and Lebanon that have a desertlike environment due to no/thin soil with an alkaline pH, having herbaceous xeric vegetation and being surrounded by Virginian junipers (misleadingly called red cedar, although there are no true American cedars). This has a dripstone cave with a disappearing stream, exposed dripstone rock, cracks that have sand with cacti and soil with sunflowers (because Minecraft doesn't have coneflowers) and spruce trees in a transition area to the temperate gardens (because Minecraft doesn't have junipers). TL;DR: This has elements of the Dripstone Caves, Desert and Sunflower Plains biomes with a Taiga-like transition area. Lush Lowlands: This is based off of Minecraft's Jungle biome, which along with the Dark Forest fits well for most of how my home state of Tennessee is naturally. I included bamboo; although foreign bamboo is horribly invasive here, our native river cane, hill cane and switch cane are technically the only non-tropical North American native bamboo species and once dominated many basins, mountain coves and river valleys. Acacia Acrophobia: This is based off of the Windswept Savanna with a twist: the cliffs are deepslate and caprock is orange terracotta (because Minecraft doesn't have shale nor chert). A stream comes out of the hilltop covered in oak and acacia trees, plummets down the cliff then briefly flows across dripstone before entering a cave. This has a Tennessean twist; the Nashville Basin is surrounded by a low plateau called the Highland Rim, with the escarpment being marked by springs, waterfalls, shale cliffs and disappearing streams among the rough terrain that separates the two mostly-flat landforms. Given that our native black locust and honey locust trees have acacia-like growth habits, as does the invasive Persian silk tree, I was able to make it work.
