Delaware Botanical Gardens: More There Than I Expected

July 13th, 2021

   Sometimes I’m disappointed when I see a highly hyped garden for the first time or see a formerly superb garden that’s going downhill.

DelBot’s Oudolf-designed meadow is hitting peak form this summer.

   Other times, though, I’m pleasantly surprised by gardens that aren’t hailed or even much known at all.

   The Coastal Maine Botanical Gardens falls into that latter category.

   So does the young 42-acre Stoneleigh Garden in Philadelphia’s Villanova area.

   Now I can add another entry to my “underrated” list – the new Delaware Botanic Gardens, located near the town of Dagsboro in southern Delaware, nearly a four-hour drive from Harrisburg.

   This 37-acre public garden was open only a year before Covid shut it down last year.

   It’s only now reopening under “normal” conditions four days a week after a second spring of timed admissions, mask rules, and difficulty recruiting the pre-Covid level of volunteers. (Hours are Thursday through Sunday from 9 a.m. to 1 p.m.)

   For being such a new garden with a jinxed infancy, DelBot is surprisingly well along. I saw it for the first time a few weeks ago and found more there already than I had read and thought.

   The garden’s main claim to fame is a 2-acre meadow designed by the famous Dutch designer Piet Oudolf. Oudolf is best known for designs that use a quilt-like matrix of grand swoops and clumps of assorted colorful perennials and grasses.

   New York’s High Line and Battery parks and Chicago’s Lurie Garden are three of his best known US works.

   Getting him to design a fledgling garden nowhere near a major metropolitan area was a bit of a coup. But the ambitious DelBot planners asked, and Oudolf came, looked, and ultimately said he’d be honored to design the meadow.

   Volunteers – up to 60 at a time – planted 70,000 plug sized perennials and grasses in 2017 and 2018.

   This season it’s hit peak form, filling in nicely with the kind of successive all-season blooming that takes an experienced hand to master.

   Alliums, amsonia, and baptisias have already finished their spring show, handing off to current early-summer bloomers such as coneflowers, helenium, sea holly, yarrow, and betony ‘Hummelo,’ a powerhouse spiky perennial named after Oudolf’s Dutch hometown.

   DelBot horticulturist Stephen Pryce Lea says fall actually may be most spectacular of all with the blooming asters and goldenrods and the fall foliage of the grasses.

DelBot’s Learning Garden and pond.

   While the meadow is the star of the show for now, there’s a worthy cast of supporting actors.

   The 12 acres of woodland gardens are filled with a wide range of shade plants and interesting accents, such as a crevice garden of miniature plants, an ornate metal fence built by a volunteer, and three giant “nests” built out of fallen and pruned branches.

   An outdoor learning garden is a pondside place for talks and classes, an Inland Dunes Garden shows how plants of the coastal past would’ve looked, and a Rhyne Garden shows how perennials can be used as an attractive way to capture stormwater runoff from a parking lot.

   The Knoll is the prime place to sit in the breezy shade with a branch-framed view of Pepper Creek below.

The Rhyne Garden drains the parking lot.

   What Carol McCloud, DelBot’s vice president, likes as much as anything are the stories the garden has generated so far.

   One is how Girl Scouts came from York County, Pa., to plant a Woodland’s Edge Garden, and another is the little boy who said he was going to come back one day to show his son the tree he just planted.

   The whole garden is an improbable story.

   DelBot isn’t a wealthy estate garden gone public or the outgrowth of a university or institute. It’s instead a grassroots effort that came out of nowhere.

   The idea traces to 2012 when a group of area residents decided that south Delaware needed a botanic garden.

   Brookside Gardens horticulture supervisor Michael Zahic spearheaded the planning committee, which led to a non-profit corporation and seed money from Longwood Gardens.

   The idea got a lot of local support, both from cash-wielding companies and citizens willing to dig in and plant and weed.

DelBot has 1,000 feet of creekside frontage.

   The key breakthrough was when Sussex County Land Trust acquired the Creekside property, which McCloud said was in the running to house a chemical plant. The trust offered it to the garden for a long-term rental deal of $1 a year.

   It was a perfect site for a garden – flat open land along the road, 1000 feet of creek frontage below, and 12 acres of woodlands between.

   The diversity sets the stage for a wide variety of plants and garden styles.

   On the drawing board is a labyrinth, a bald cypress garden with a large freshwater pond and terraced water features, a Discovery Garden for kids, and a Coastal Living Garden that’ll be an idea garden for local landscaping.

   It’ll be interesting to see how it all takes shape in the coming years and decades.

   Maybe by then, it won’t be underrated anymore.