New York, New Jersey, Delaware
These are gardens I’ve been to in New York, New Jersey and Delaware that I believe are worth a visit. I’d highly advise double-checking on hours before visiting since not all are open every day or year round.
One of BBG’s perennial gardens.
BROOKLYN BOTANIC GARDEN
Location: 1000 Washington Ave., Brooklyn, N.Y.
Overview: Once a city ash dump, these 39 acres were carved out to become a plant haven right in the heart of bustling Brooklyn. It’s a traditional public garden with some 2 dozen theme beds connected by paved walks – plus very strong research and education arms.
Highlights: The Cranford Rose Garden is probably its best known garden, but BBG also has the distinction of building the nation’s first Japanese garden and first children’s garden within a public garden. Both are still very much alive and active. Also: a New York native woodland, a Shakespeare garden, several flower borders, a fragrance garden, collections of lilacs, tree peonies and conifers and a conservatory with tropicals and a bonsai collection.
George’s Take: The Japanese garden with its spacious pond and viewing pavilion is my favorite feature here. Take time to just sit and look. The cherries are gorgeous in April, and the rose garden peaks in June and early fall.
Contact info: www.bbg.org. 718-623-7200.
FRELINGHUYSEN ARBORETUM
A veggie garden in Frelinghuysen’s home demo section.
Location: 353 E. Hanover Ave., Morristown, N.J., in Morris Twp., Morris County
Overview: Now owned and operated by the Morris County Park Commission, this park and estate was once the summer home of wealthy patent attorney George Griswold Frelinghuysen. His daughter transformed the former working farm into an arboretum in the mid-1900s, and she willed it to the county as a public park.
Highlights: 127 acres of theme gardens, woods and meadows, plus a Colonial Revival mansion. It’s also got a library with a valuable collection of antique horticulture books and a carriage house with a small collection of antique carriages. Free.
George’s Take: I like the collection of home demo gardens best here, but there’s a peaceful sitting area overlooking the knot garden and rose garden where I could spend a few hours sitting. Plant geeks will like the Promising Plants Garden of up-and-coming flowers.
Contact info: www.arboretumfriends.org. 973-326-7601.
Mt. Cuba house from the Round Garden.
MT. CUBA CENTER
Location: 3120 Barley Mill Road, Hockessin, Del., a short drive from Wilmington.
Overview: 650 acres dedicated mainly to growing and researching plants native to the Appalachian Piedmont. It’s another of the du Pont estates (Pierre’s nephew Lamott du Pont Copeland), dating to 1935. Located in a beautiful rural setting.
Highlights: Woodland paths everywhere are filled with mostly native trees, shrubs, perennials and groundcovers – nearly 2,000 species in all. But there’s also a sunny meadow, research trial beds of perennials and lilacs, and a few more formal, non-native gardens closer to the house, such as the brick-walled, brick-pathed terrace gardens and the poolside “Round Garden” that’s filled with bulbs in spring and annuals in summer.
George’s Take: A must-see for anyone interested in native plants. Almost all natives worth growing in a landscape or wooded setting are here, including rareties such as the swamp buttercup, nodding trilliums and bigleaf asters. It’s especially beautiful in spring when so many of the natives bloom and again in fall when the trees and shrubs turn color.
Contact info: www.mtcubacenter.org. 302-239-4244.
The view out the front of Nemours Mansion.
NEMOURS MANSION AND GARDENS
Location: Alapocas Road and Route 141 just outside Wilmington, Del.
Overview: Another of four du Pont estates (Alfred I.) in the Brandywine Valley, Nemours is a polar opposite of Mt. Cuba. These 222 acres are very formal and patterned in classic French style after the gardens at Versailles.
Highlights: The house is open for tours and is well worth the visit – it’s a full acre under roof and has many luxurious curiosities. Formal gardens feature clipped evergreens, oceans of lawn, bronze statuary, huge concrete planters, tree allees, a large reflecting pool with fountain jets and several massed beds of spring bulbs and summer annuals.
George’s Take: Not a lot of plant variety or beds of blooms to stroll through if you’re a color-loving plant geek. The sheer impressiveness of the design will make you go, “Wow!” though. I enjoyed the house tour more here, especially the bowling alley and some of the ahead-of-its-time technology.
Contact info: www.nemoursmansion.org. 302-651-6912.
NEW JERSEY GROUNDS FOR SCULPTURE
The waterfalls with Rats Restaurant in the background.
Location: 126 Sculptors Way, Hamilton, N.J., near Princeton and about a 2-hour drive east of Harrisburg.
Overview: 42-acre landscaped park that serves as a setting for nearly 300 outdoors sculptures by some 150 artists. A variety of garden settings are planted to accommodate the diverse styles of sculptures, and the plant selection is equally diverse and interesting.
Highlights: The large pond with waterlilies and a striking waterfall with a Monet bridge is the most beautiful scene. You’ll also find a wildflower meadow, a bamboo forest, a lotus pond, a shady lakeside walk, a perennial garden, a series of water-garden “rooms,” and cutting-edge plants such as golden dawn redwoods, columnar Oriental spruce and dwarf weeping conifers.
George’s Take: I was pleasantly surprised and very impressed at this place. I was expecting sculptures as the stars with plain-Jane plants as backdrops, but NJ Grounds is as attractive to garden-oglers as it is to sculpture-lovers. See a photo gallery of 20 pictures I took at NJ Grounds in June 2015.
Contact info: www.groundsforsculpture.org 609-586-0616.
NYBG’s Enid Haupt Conservatory behind a perennial garden.
NEW YORK BOTANICAL GARDEN
Location: Next to Bronx Zoo at Bronx River Parkway and Fordham Road in The Bronx, New York City.
Overview: 250 acres of plant collections and 50 theme gardens, including 55 acres of native forest showing what New York looked like before all of the concrete.
Highlights: Beautiful Enid Haupt Conservatory that’s America’s largest Victorian-style glasshouse, multi-faceted Children’s Adventure Garden, 1 million kinds of plants, world’s fourth largest dried-specimen collection, one of the world’s largest rock gardens, conifer collections, numerous border and flower gardens, rose garden, 8,000 orchid varieties, 30,000 trees, a home-garden demo section, large gift shop, very good food and among the world’s best horticulture research and education programs.
George’s Take: Staggering diversity of plants, but enough sheer beauty to keep both the serious plant geek and the more stroll-minded spouse happy. The conservatory is particularly amazing. On my top 5 list. Maybe even top 3…
Contact info: www.nybg.org. 718-817-8700.
Lily pond and fountain at Old Westbury.
OLD WESTBURY GARDENS
Location: 71 Old Westbury Road, Old Westbury, N.Y., just off Route 495 Expressway on Long Island.
Overview: One of Long Island’s original “Gold Coast” estates, Old Westbury is 160 acres of mostly formal gardens and manicured grounds, anchored by a 3-story, 1906 mansion furnished with English antiques and open for tours.
Highlights: Formal rooms everywhere: topiary evergreens next to the mansion, landscaped ponds, a rose garden, trimmed hedges, a formal water garden with fountain, gazebo and waterlilies, a formal walled-in garden and perfect lawns galore.
George’s Take: Meticulous. Formal fans will love this one. Most impressive is the ornate ironworks, the concrete columns, the walled garden and the other spare-no-expense hardscaping that makes up the landscape framework here.
Contact info: www.oldwestburygardens.org. 516-333-0048.
Annuals in Planting Fields’ poolside garden.
PLANTING FIELDS ARBORETUM
Location: 1395 Planting Fields Road, Oyster Bay, N.Y., on Long Island’s North Shore.
Overview: Another one of Long Island’s original “Gold Coast” estates, Planting Fields today is a combination wooded park with a 65-room house (now a museum open to tours) surrounded by varied gardens and plant collections.
Highlights: More than 400 acres in all, about half is devoted to woodland trails with mature trees and tall evergreens. For garden fans, highlights are the poolside flower plantings, the 5-acre “Synoptic Garden” of 500 species arranged in alphabetical order by their botanical names, a dahlia garden, a rose garden, a dwarf conifer collection, lots of heaths and heathers (they actually survive on the island’s sandy soil) and glasshouses filled with camellias, hibiscus, orchids, cacti, begonias, ferns and more.
George’s Take: Planting Fields is big enough that you don’t really walk it, you explore it. I can’t imagine this, at one time, being someone’s yard.
Contact info: www.plantingfields.org. 516-922-9200.
Weeping katsura just starting to turn in fall through trellis opening at Stonecrop.
STONECROP GARDENS
Location: 81 Stonecrop Lane, Cold Spring, N.Y., in the lower Hudson Valley near Poughkeepsie.
Overview: New York venture capitalist Frank Cabot built a summer home on this 63-acre site in the 1950s and set about recrafting the landscape with boulders, ponds and gardens. The result is diversity ranging from native woods to open meadow to artificially created rock ledges.
Highlights: The peaceful wooded gardens built around the rocks and ponds are most amazing, but you’ll also find alpine trough plantings, perennial gardens, a “Systematic Order” garden showing plants by related families, woodland gardens and a grove of dawn redwood trees. Especially cool is the gunnera plant with 6-foot leaves that survives here only because a wooden hut is built around it each winter.
George’s Take: This a hidden gem if I’ve ever seen one. Hardly anyone knows about this place, but it’s extremely well designed and planted — not your cookie-cutter collection of common theme gardens. I was both pleasantly surprised and impressed. It’s especially nice in fall.
Contact info: www.stonecrop.org. 845-265-2000.
Mixed garden with a yucca centerpiece at Wave Hill.
WAVE HILL
Location: 675 W. 252nd St., The Bronx, N.Y.
Overview: The grand view across the Hudson River to New Jersey’s Palisades is what drew monied folks uptown to this overlook in the 1800s. The property’s third owner (George Perkins of J.P. Morgan) added most of the gardens and landscaping in the early 1900s. It became a public garden in 1960 when Wave Hill was deeded to New York City.
Highlights: It’s only 28 acres but very well designed and diverse for the size, featuring mixed flower gardens, great containers, a water garden, an alpine plant house, extensive herb gardens, specimen trees and collections of viburnums, lilacs and conifers.
George’s Take: Love the Hudson view! That alone is worth the trip. Seems bigger than 28 acres. Nicely done. In my top dozen or so.
Contact info: www.wavehill.org. 718-549-3200.
Formal water feature behind the Winterthur mansion.
WINTERTHUR
Location: Along Route 52 in Winterthur, Del., about halfway between Longwood Gardens and Wilmington, Del.
Overview: Henry Francis du Pont inherited the land and began turning 982 acres into an American “manor house,” patterned after the wealthy European country estates that were whole self-contained farming villages with gardens, art collections and libraries. As a result, Winterthur today is a combination museum specializing in American decorative arts, a library rich in American history, art and architecture texts, and, of course, gardens.
Highlights: H.F. leaned natural instead of formal, so you’ll find woodland gardens of spring bulbs, rhodies and azaleas, walks through collections of evergreens, peonies and winter hazel, an “Enchanted Woods” children’s garden aimed at inspiring imagination, and a boulder-lined Quarry Garden filled with a variety of perennials, bulbs, shrubs and groundcovers.
George’s Take: It’s really three different places in one. Garden-wise, mid-April through May is when Winterthur is most glorious when the lakes of bulbs bloom and hundreds upon hundreds of rhodies and azalea are at peak. My favorite feature, though, is the shady children’s garden.
Contact info: www.winterthur.org. 302-888-4600.