Meijer Gardens: 158 Acres of Sculpture and Glass

The site breaks into three zones and they take very different amounts of time.

Nearest the entrance sit the indoor spaces: the ticketing centre, the galleries that hold the seasonal displays, the carnivorous and arid houses, and the tropical conservatory, which is the tall one with the waterfall. You could do this half alone in an hour and it is the entire visit on a bad-weather day.

Behind it lies the formal outdoor garden ring — the children's garden, the sculpture gallery courtyards, the perennial and English-style beds — where most of the paving is flat and most people spend their second hour.

Then the ground opens out. The main sculpture park runs away across mown grass and rough meadow into the woodland and wetland trail with its long boardwalk, and this is where the acreage stops being a number. Allow ninety minutes to walk the outer collection properly. A tram runs a loop of the park in the warmer months, which is the difference between a comfortable visit and a miserable one for anyone who does not want three miles on their feet, though it does not run all year.

Practical consequence: three hours is the honest minimum for a first visit that includes the outdoor sculpture, and four is better. If you have ninety minutes, do the conservatory and the seasonal gallery and accept that you have seen a third of it.

Three hundred-plus works is too many to see with any attention, so here is where to spend it.

The American Horse. Nina Akamu's bronze, standing around twenty-four feet, is the piece on the postcards. Its origin is genuinely strange: Leonardo da Vinci spent years on a colossal horse for the Duke of Milan that was never cast, and the clay model was destroyed by French troops in the 1490s. Akamu's sculpture is a late-twentieth-century answer to that unbuilt commission, and a twin was given to Milan. A Renaissance loose end, resolved in a Michigan meadow.

The di Suvero. Mark di Suvero's steel works read as engineering until you stand under one and feel the counterweight. They suit this park better than they suit a plaza, because you can walk a full circle at fifty yards and watch the thing rearrange itself.

Ai Weiwei's zodiac heads. Twelve bronze animal heads, a reconstruction-slash-provocation aimed at the looted fountain clock of the Old Summer Palace in Beijing. Children like them because they are animals. Read the label and they are about who owns what.

Beyond those, look for Rodin, Henry Moore, Jaume Plensa's quiet seated figures and Chihuly's glass indoors. The collection is stronger in modern and contemporary work than most visitors expect from a garden, which is the point: this was always meant to be an art museum that happens to have weather.

The Richard and Helen DeVos Japanese Garden opened on 10 June 2015, covers eight acres, and was designed by Hoichi Kurisu, who had a hand in the Portland Japanese Garden before this. It sits down a slope on the far side of the sculpture park, which means a good number of visitors run out of legs before they reach it. Do not be one of them.

What makes it work is that it was built as a garden rather than as a garden feature. There is a waterfall, a pond you walk around rather than across, a stroll route that keeps hiding and revealing the same view, a zen garden of raked gravel, and contemporary sculpture placed sparingly enough that it reads as punctuation instead of decoration. Kurisu's water is the good bit: you hear it before the path gives it to you.

Seasonally it is the most variable ground on the site. Spring gives you the blossom and the first green. Autumn is the peak, and in a normal Michigan October the maples here are the best colour inside the city limits. Winter strips it back to structure, stone and snow, which is arguably how this kind of garden reads best and which almost nobody comes to see.

Allow forty minutes if you are walking it and an hour if you intend to sit, which you should.