My January tour of Costa Rica’s tropical gardens and landscapes was an amazing experience. Our group of 12 travelers from various corners of the US, along with our local guide, Jose, and driver Danny, enjoyed wonderful camaraderie, stunning views, varied terrain, beautiful flowers and delicious cuisine in a week-long exploration of this Central American haven.  Day 1 Our first stop on the Costa Rica Garden Tour was the stunning private garden of Senora Ileana Terán in Turrialba. Senora Terán began her garden 60 years ago as a new bride on the coffee plantation. Located on a mountain side ..read more

January and February are the toughest months for gardeners with snow, ice and bitter, cold winds making forays into the garden unpleasant. An afternoon spent in a warm, lushly planted greenhouse is a welcome respite from our Northeast winter. So call one of your gardening friends and make a date to visit one of our local gardens under glass. courtesy of wellesley college Wellesley College Global Flora Conservatory The Global Flora conservatory at Wellesley College is a part of the Wellesley College Botanic Garden. This new conservatory was built in 2019, and houses plants from every continent ..read more

Beyond its rides, characters and attractions, Walt Disney World is one of the largest gardens in the world with more than 40 square miles of plant displays. Walt Disney alway considered landscaping as an integral element of the park. When planning Disneyland in California, he traveled to Europe several times and brought home notebooks filled with inspiration and gardening techniques. He was particularly impressed with Copenhagen’s Tivoli Gardens, and wanted his own parks to overflow with beautiful flowers and color. As a result, floriculture and horticulture have been big features at each of ..read more

Interior View, West Conservatory. Image by Ngoc Minh Ngo. Courtesy of Reed Hilderbrand. By Jourdan Cole, Longwood Gardens Longwood Gardens, America’s greatest center for horticultural display, will unveil Longwood Reimagined: A New Garden Experience to the public on November 22, 2024, celebrating the final stage of the most ambitious revitalization in the Garden’s 100-year history. Led by the acclaimed architecture practice WEISS/MANFREDI in collaboration with eminent landscape architecture firm Reed Hilderbrand, Longwood Reimagined expands the public spaces of the renowned central grounds ad ..read more

By Jim Charlier As gardeners, we always try to make unique and creative green spaces. I'm thrilled to share a magical garden story brewing in Buffalo, New York—one that captivates Harry Potter fans and garden lovers both! Jim's garden is whimsical and includes many projects created for Harry Potter Herbology Magic. A Wizarding Garden Takes Root in 2008, I planted a Harry Potter-themed garden to interest my ten-year-old daughter in gardening. As we read the books, we wrote down the names of plants and their other-worldly descriptions—like Puffapod: Fat pink pods with seeds that burst into fl ..read more

The Met Cloisters is one of the gardens profiled in The Garden Tourist’s Mid-Atlantic. A branch of The Metropolitan Museum of Art, The Cloisters is the only museum dedicated to the art of the Middle Ages in the United States. Incorporating five medieval cloisters, the museum evokes the architecture of the Middle Ages and displays medieval metalwork, painting, sculpture, stained glass, and textiles. It is also renowned for its three cloister gardens, which were designed as an integral part of the museum when it was built in 1938. The Romanesque Cuxa Cloister was originally part of a 12th-cent ..read more

photo by ray bojarksi I first heard of the Delaware Botanic Gardens in 2017 when a fellow Massachusetts landscape designer mentioned that she was traveling to Delaware to volunteer her time planting a new meadow. This meadow was to be the central feature of a fledgling botanic garden in southern Delaware, and was designed by the internationally renowned Dutch designer Piet Oudolf. Oudolf is a “rock star” in the landscape design community, who championed a romantic, sustainable, prairie style of grasses and perennials that are woven in soft drifts. I was immediately intrigued, and visited the ..read more

Many of you visited Joyce Hannaford’s exuberant garden in Natick, Mass. during the Enchanted Gardens Tours in June and July. Joyce’s garden is packed with colorful flowers that bloom from spring through fall, peaking in mid July. Visitors are always curious about Joyce’s maintenance routines. Below, Joyce answers some of the most  often asked gardening questions. Joyce’s tips: It seems that tending my garden has become a full-time job. It just seemed to happen over the years; it was not part of a plan when we purchased our home 25 years ago. Color: To have a colorful garden, I add many ..read more

By Antonia Hieronymus When looking for a property suitable for raising a family and building a garden in 1994, my main criterion was to live by water. A property overlooking an old reservoir seemed perfect, so we jumped at it. Perhaps it should have been a clue that the house had been on the market for seven years?!  It was our first rookie mistake. While we do have mosquitoes in my native England, they are innocuous compared with the blood-sucking behemoths which teem in their thousands around us. The entire property is on a slope with a swamp and stream, presenting many design, wetland ..read more

Rose Lion’s fairy tale with Clematis Huldine Every year I focus on updating a different section of my garden, and 2016 was the year of the rose bed. I have always grown roses in my garden—in fact they were the first flowers that I planted when we moved into our house in 1992. Six roses came on the moving truck with us from the city. I grew them in pots on the porch of our rented apartment in Somerville, and overwintered them in the unheated stairwell. They went into the ground in a circular bed in my front yard, created by the previous owner's leaf pile that had been left there over the winte ..read more