Midwest Gardens to Put on Your Radar

November 8th, 2022

   If you’re back in the traveling game again, you’ll find several good gardening destinations on a trip into America’s Midwest.

Nashville’s Cheekwood Garden had this fall-themed archway looking good.

   I’m just back from leading a Lowee’s tour that took us through Nashville, into St. Louis, and back through Louisville and Columbus. We ogled a diverse group of visit-worthy gardens at each place.

   My favorite was St. Louis’ world-class Missouri Botanical Garden, which I’ve rated as No. 3 in my e-book “50 American Public Gardens You Really Ought to See.” (Spoiler: Longwood is No. 1, and New York Botanical Garden is No. 2.)

   “Mobot,” as it’s nicknamed, is 79 acres packed with themes and styles of every imaginable kind, from a garden of tree stumps to home-garden-sized idea gardens to a unique glass-and-aluminum, dome conservatory called the Climatron.

   Kentucky’s Yew Dell Gardens is an underrated gem, Columbus’ Franklin Conservatory is better than ever with its new Children’s Garden, and Nashville’s most amazing plant display isn’t in a garden at all but several tropical wonderlands inside the Gaylord Opryland’s resort.

   If you like pictures rather than words, have a look at 50 shots from the trip that I just posted in my Photo Gallery section.

   Otherwise, here’s a quick rundown of the highlights of each stop…

Belle Meade Historic Site and Winery

   This Nashville attraction is a good example of a former Southern plantation, one that specialized in breeding thoroughbred horses in the late 1800s. Belle Meade’s most famous sire is Bonnie Scotland, whose descendants have won two-thirds of all Kentucky Derbies.

   The 30 acres that remain feature a small winery, the Harding mansion, park-like landscaping, and 10 out-buildings, including a dairy, a gardener’s house, a carriage and stable house, and one of the largest smokehouses in Tennessee.

This is the water-jet garden inside one of the atriums of the Gaylord Opryland resort.

Gaylord Opryland

   Grandiose doesn’t begin to capture how big and majestic this sprawling Nashville resort is. At 2,888 rooms, Opryland is one of the 30 biggest hotels in the world.

    But what’s most impressive is the three huge atriums that rival some of America’s best public-garden conservatories.

   This place is so big that you can take a flatboat ride through the rainforests and waterfalls of the Delta Atrium.

   The Garden Conservatory lets you traverse a skywalk above more water features, an ornate gazebo, and thousands more tropical plants, while the Cascades section has a three-and-a-half-story waterfall and a novel water feature with water jets jumping from one moss-covered boulder to another.

   Opryland comes with a ridiculous room price tag, but at least you can see where a lot of the money is being spent.

Cheekwood Estates and Gardens

   Nashville’s premier public garden is this 55-acre historic estate, built by the Cheek family’s Maxwell House coffee fortune.

   The 30,000-square-foot Georgian-style mansion is the site’s centerpiece, and it’s surrounded by a mix of formal and informal gardens, including a boxwood garden with a formal pool, a Japanese garden, a perennial garden, and my favorite, Cheekwood’s new Children’s Garden with two acres of interactive beds and exploration areas.

Mobot’s Kemper Center features two dozen gardens, including this colorful one.

Missouri Botanical Garden

   This gift of pioneer merchant Henry Shaw, located in the heart of St. Louis, is one of America’s best and oldest public gardens, dating to 1859.

   What makes it so special is the diversity of gardens that are packed into every curve and corner of its 79 acres. There’s something here for every gardener, and all of the collections, theme gardens, and displays are top-quality.

   The Climatron is Mobot’s signature feature, but it also has America’s biggest Japanese garden at 14 acres, an excellent pioneer-themed Children’s Garden, and my favorite section, the eight-acre Kemper Center for Home Gardening, which has 23 distinct gardens that give tips and ideas to home gardeners.

   Mobot also has a Plant Doctor clinic that fields questions from the public and the best website for researching plants. If you ever need details on a specific plant, check out the Plant Finder section of the garden’s website. It’s the site I use when researching plants.

Cave Hill Cemetery

   Why visit a cemetery? Cave Hill in Louisville is more than just a burial ground but a 296-acre Victorian-era “garden-style cemetery” that functioned as a city park in the days before dedicated parks came into vogue.

   Cave Hill is also a certified arboretum with a superb collection of mature tree specimens, including America’s biggest yellowwood and some of the biggest, oldest oaks, magnolias, beech, and hickories that you’ll see anywhere.

   A tranquil lake with fountains is the centerpiece of Cave Hill, which is also home to boxer Muhammad Ali’s gravesite and the grave of Col. Harland Sanders of KFC fame.

Churchill Downs

   Louisville’s best known attraction is Churchill Downs, home to the Kentucky Derby.

   The racetrack has its own horticulture staff that grows 25,000 annuals each spring of about 90 varieties in its on-site greenhouses. It’s a colorful landscape in peak form.

   Nothing was going on in the greenhouses this time of year, but the staff offers behind-the-scenes tours for gardeners if you’d like to get a taste of this famous site.

Here’s one of Bernheim’s wooden giants.

Bernheim Arboretum and Research Forest

   Also in the Louisville area is this combination arboretum, public woodland, and nature preserve that covers more than 16,000 acres. It’s Kentucky’s official state arboretum and showcases more than 1,900 species and cultivars of woody plants.

   Bernheim is an excellent place for a hike and picnic on a cool sunny day (which we had there), and it also has a pollinator garden and a large edible garden near the visitor center.

   A big attraction lately is the three figures of troll-like giants crafted out of recycled wood.

A meadow garden at Yew Dell.

Yew Dell Gardens

   One other public garden worth seeing before leaving the Louisville area is this 34-acre former home and plant nursery of Kentucky plantsman Theodore Klein.

   Klein landscaped the property himself with all sorts of interesting and unusual plants, and he was talented stoneworker, too, as you’ll see from the buildings and walls.

   Yew Dell became a public garden soon after Klein died in 1998. Today it’s a nice stroll garden with assorted themes around each curve, including a meadow, a walled garden with pond, a pair of plant-trial gardens, and an arboretum with one of the Midwest’s best tree and shrub collections.

The hillside water feature at Inniswood Metro Parks.

Inniswood Metro Park

   This is a large county park in suburban Columbus, Ohio, that thinks it’s a botanic garden.

   Inniswood covers 120+ acres and features walking trails, a wooded area, and more than 2,000 species of plants in a variety of themed gardens.

   The two most impressive areas are the herb garden with its knot garden and a hillside rock garden with a beautiful water feature running down it.

Franklin Park Conservatory

   This is a large glasshouse in Columbus built in 1895 and listed on the National Register of Historic Places. It’s one of America’s top conservatories and has 90 acres of surrounding gardens and green space in addition to the palms, bonsai specimens, water features, and many tropicals inside the glasshouse.

Franklin Park Conservatory’s palm house.

   Franklin Park’s newest addition is the Children’s Garden, which is one of the best I’ve seen anywhere. Kids could spend a whole day playing in these two acres.

   Next to the conservatory is the Columbus Community Garden Campus, which is a city block full of demo gardens, an education building, arbors, benches, fountains, parterre gardens, and more, all built by the Scotts Miracle-Gro Co.

Last trip of 2022

   If you’d like to tour a few gardeny sites during the Christmas season, Lowee’s and I have one more trip planned for 2022.

   It runs Dec. 5-10, starting with a visit to the North Carolina Arboretum near Asheville, then to George Vanderbilt’s Biltmore mansion decorated to the hilt for Christmas, then a tour of Smoky Mountain National Park – America’s most visited national park.

   We then head to Gatlinburg, Tenn., and then two nights in the resort village of Pigeon Forge, including a visit to Dollywood with its four million Christmas lights, plus shows, music, and rides.

   The last stop is to Parrot Mountain and its Garden of Eden featuring toucans, magpies, a picturesque waterfall, and tens of thousands of flowers.

   The six-day, five-night trip costs $1,199 per person double, which includes transportation, admissions, five nights’ lodging, and eight meals.

   You’re invited. More information is available by calling Lowee’s Group Tours at 717-657-9658 or toll-free 1-888-345-6933 or by emailing CKelly@Lowees.com. Or see the itinerary on Lowee’s website, where you can now book the trip directly online by selecting the “List Dates” tab.