Flower Gardens Beautiful Enough For Special Visit?
 

I love flowers, and plan visits to Charleston, Savannah, North Carolina mountains, Hawaii, etc.......... to some degree, when I know the flowering bushes / flower gardens are at their most beautiful.

What other places can you recommend in the U.S., where the flowers, in a given season, will take my breath away?

Thanks in advance!

I haven't been yet, but I have heard that Portland Oregon has amazing Rose Gardens.

We were just at Longwood Gardens, about an hour from Philadelphia. You could spend a whole day here. In the summer, they have fountain displays, and on special nights even fireworks. Their Christmas displays are also wonderful.

Not in the US, but Butchart Gardens in Victoria, Canada is also gorgeous.

Karens, would you believe that I used to live in South Jersey and never got over to those gardens!!!!!!! Thanks for reminding me.

Scarlett, I'll bet roses would grow beautifully in the Oregon climate. I'll have to check that out...... My roses are pretty in our very brief Spring........ then have a few more by end of Sept/Oct. But in between, way too hot!

Thanks, guys.....

The Missouri Botanical Gardens are beautiful.

Here bonnie ((F))

http://www.parks.ci.portland.or.us/P...oseGardens.htm

Try Filoli's in San Mateo (just south of San Francisco) it is a historic mansion with incredible gardens on the grounds. There are numerous rose gardens in the Bay Area. San Jose (South Bay) has a small but beautiful municipal rose garden and one other as well but I haven't been to it. Berkeley has one (East Bay)but it was a bit tired looking and ill kept last time I visited. SF has a botanical garden in Golden gate park. You could make a whole Bay Area sweep!

Bonnie, are you a Master Gardener like me? I will travel far and wide to find a good garden! I agree that Charleston and Savannah have lovely gardens (two of my favorite cities, hands down), but if you are ever in my part of the US, the Midwest, you should visit Chicago. The Botanic Gardens--not far outside the city--are spectacular. It takes the better part of a day to fully appreciate the spectacular displays of flowers, shrubs, and trees, all artfully arranged and lovingly tended. It's a botanical experience you won't forget.

The city of Chicago is no slouch either when it comes to flowers. There are hanging baskets on all the lamp posts, window boxes everywhere, and imaginative sidewalk gardens downtown on the Magnificent Mile. I've never seen anything quite like it. Whoever designs the flower displays in Chicago is a genius.

Bonnie: The California Poppy Reserve in Antelope Valley, CA is the best natural display of flowers I've ever seen. If you go during full bloom in spring it really is breathtaking, like a blanket of gold fire that stretches for miles and miles. If you can't see the reserve in person, a local TV show did an episode on it, available here:

http://www.calgold.com/calgold/Defau...00&Show=42

Descanso Gardens in La Cañada, CA is another great place for flowers. Their bloom schedule is available here:

http://www.descanso.com/bloom.cfm

Another I love are the Huntington Botanical Gardens in San Marino CA:

http://www.huntington.org/BotanicalD...nicalHome.html

Many people wouldn't think of Southern California as a garden mecca, but we do have our share of show stoppers. One last and not-well-known suggestion, if your timing is right (late Fall, right after the first rains of the wet season) go out to the desert south of Palm Springs, along Hwy 74. We stumbled on it one year and had to stop our car, the cactus flowers were so amazingly beautiful.

In addition to its Rose Garden, Portland, OR, also has beautiful Japanese and Chinese gardens (www.japanesegarden.com and www.portlandchinesegarden.org). If you are up in NW in July, Sequim, WA, is probably the best place to see lavender (outside Provence). It's the lavender capital of the U.S. and holds an excellent lavender festival on the third weekend of July (www.lavendergrowers.org). One of the best of the lavender farms is Purple Haze (www.purplehazelavender.com). They also offer classes in lavender growing, drying and products, as well.
At the edge of Austin, TX, the Ladybird Johnson Wildflower Center (www.wildflower.org) is very good with a lot of helpful information. My mother and I spent hours there on a late spring day with hardly anyone else around.

Forgot to add that Sequim is also one of the best places to grow roses in the U.S., they start blooming in Feb and keep on going almost all the way to Christmas, taking a brief rest in late December and January. Sequim has one of the mildest, most relaxing climates in the U.S., feels like late spring for months on end.

The Cranbrook Estate in Bloomfield Hills MI has stunning gardens of every variety. I worked as a volunteer on their herbaceous borders for some time. There is a daffodil hill where over 100,000 bulbs are planted, there is a water garden, several types of border gardens, an evergreen tree garden with huge number of varieties, a woodland garden, a sunken garden that is replanted after the tulips are spent with annuals in the traditional bedding plant style. A new design is conceived each years. There is a Herbal knot garden with roses (hips for tea).

One seldom hears of it. It is a national trust property and home to a fabulous art school The sculptures, especially Carl Milles, are beautiful and the architecture is also lovely.

I've toured gardens in the south, in England, in France (Giverny, Versailles) and these gardens will stand to any of them.

http://www.cranbrook.edu/housgard/H_G-home.html

A picture of the annual display in the sunken garden:
http://www.designjk.com/photography/...crw_6020.shtml

LilMsFoodie (who is also an avid gardener)

Second recommendation on fabulous gardens: Napa Valley. Some of the vineyards have amazing gardens as part of their public face. Years ago I visited Cakebread, a tiny winery, and was as enchanted with their herbaceous border as I was with their Sauvignon Blanc. LMF

Botanical Garden in Anchorage, AK took my breath away in July. Not a garden but blooming tundra in Alaska is so intoxicating that we return there every year. The best time to see and smell bloming tundra is in July.

Have you ever been to Bellingrath Gardens near Mobile AL? I suggest it to all southern visitors. It is breathtaking in the spring but beautiful all year round. Here is their site.
http://www.bellingrath.org/

Ravine Gardens State Park in Palatka, FL really took my breath away. The combination of the unusual topography, so different from most of the flat Florida terrain, coupled with the blooming of many many colorful azaleas, still lingers in my mind. This is a large gaping crevace in the earth that was supposedly cut by the St. Johns River. I suppose the height of the flowering season for azaleas there is in the fall but I don't recall when I was there. I don't think there is much else that flowers there so the rest of the time it is flowerless.

The other thing I recall about the gardens was an 8 foot long rattler that slithered through the clearing. It also took my breath away, just before the ranger took it away to its ultimate demise.

May 14-17, 2005...the Tulip Festival in Holland, Michigan...the photos that some family have taken there in the past were beautiful !

dln, I wish I were a master gardener! My husband is more the gardener (with me advising!;-) ) But I grew up on a big farm, with my grandmother (now there was a flower gardener!) and mother teaching me the love of beautiful flowers....... and we had tons on the farm! I can still smell my grandmother's huge lilac bushes over in Western North Carolina..... and she had gorgeous rose bushes than I can't manage here around Raleigh. My mother and I share a apecial love for the Spring flowers & trees.......... irises, daffodils, forsythia. She is in a nursing home now, but when I take those flowers to her, her face lights up and, in her way, she "talks" to me!

Thank you, all of you, for your great responses. We are now retired and getting ready to take a lot of driving trips, so this thread will be in my suitcase wherever we go! We both love flowers and gardens so much that we will plan trips accordingly........:-)

bonnie-my grandfather was the gardener in our family ((L))
He was a chef, and no matter where he worked/lived, he would make a garden. Tomatoes blooming on the porch in New Orleans, Dahlias as big as my head in the desert in Tucson. I don't remember the flower but I do remember the hummingbirds outside of their window in San Diego.
I will never be as good a gardener as he was but I think I did inherit a flower gene or two ((F))

There are two that I can think of right now. I haven't been in the spring (only summer), but I think that the spring would be spectacular- The Biltmore Estate and Gardens in Asheville, NC. I really love the bulbs so I think that it would be amazing. The other is not one that people would expect but it is in Houston Texas where I used to live. It is called Bayou Bend and they have the Azaela Trail in early to mid March. It has to be one of the most beautiful formal gardens that I have ever seen. During this time you can also take tours of othter homes/gardens in the River Oaks area.