| New Jersey is blessed with public gardens where visitors can experience every spring blooming plant that will grow in the region. The six gardens included here were all once private estates, each with a special botanical story to tell. They each have maintained some original garden designs; and some plants, notably shrubs and trees, planted by the families who once lived there, remain. Among the historic gardens, a plethora of plants color and scent the landscape in spring. |
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| New Jersey Botanical Gardens at Skylands, New Jersey's official botanical garden since 1966, has 96 acres of outstanding gardens and collections originating from 1923, when plant collector Clarence Lewis built his Tudor-style manor at Skylands. Many of Lewis's trees and shrubs still decorate the grounds, and his formal garden designs are intact. Weeping cherries, mostly Japanese varieties, are interspersed around the manor house, especially on the West Lawn, and bloom in April. Forsythia and thousands of daffodils appear throughout the gardens and bloom into March. Star, Saucer (the magnolia) and other early magnolias bloom everywhere, including along the Terrace Garden. |
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| Leonard J. Buck Garden in Far Hills NJ is a naturalistic garden created in a glacial stream valley. In April, you're greeted by flowering crabapple. Down the steps through June-blooming rhododendron and nodding heads of hellebore, you face Big Rock, dynamited and sculpted by geologist and land-owner Leonard J. Buck and landscape architect Zenon Schreiber in the 1930s. The alpines that once inhabited the rock no longer exist, but wild columbine has lived there from Buck's day. In early April and March, other rock-loving plants decorate the outcrop spring ephemerals, bulbs, soft purple spring starflower, wind flower, white bells of double wood anemones, blue sanguinaria, spring beauties and Virginia bluebells. It is a rockscape of miniature flowers of every color. |
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