Gardens of New Jersey's Skylands, northern NJ


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Gardens

Guide yourself across the most awesome and beautiful countenance of New Jersey's Northwest. For your peace and pleasure, embrace the wonders of Skylands gardens and find inspiration as you would at a fine art museum. The sculptures created by astounding aesthetic combinations of plant, landscape and architecture awaken and delight every sense in an embrace with nature.

"A garden's mission is complex, multi-faceted and dependent on its stage of development... While plants may seem to have a low profile in our society, they are the basis of life as we know it. A garden's real mission is to make this fact abundantly clear by serving to improve communications between the plant world and the human world."- Shannon Smith, Why a Botanical Garden in The Public Garden, Jan 1989 Gardens

Hunterdon County

Hunterdon County Arboretum
A 73-acre retired nursery encloses a 20,000 square-foot formal display garden. Mature walls of trees surround an annual and vegetable All-American Selections display garden and Alphabet Herb and Children's Garden. There are easy hiking trails, a boardwalk, greenhouse, and century-old two-story gazebo.
1020 Route 31, Lebanon, 908/782-1158

Morris County

Bamboo Brook Outdoor Education Center/Willowwood Arboretum
This former estate includes 100 acres of fields, woodlands and a formal garden designed by Martha Brookes Hutcheson, one of the country's first female landscape architects. She and her husband owned the estate. The gardens are undergoing extensive restoration to return them to Hutcheson's original designs. Willowwood Arboretum is a plant collector's dream. Its 130 acres contain rare and unique plant specimens dating back to the 1910s when the Tubbs brothers collected and planted undesigned rows and rows of "like species" of trees and shrubs. Plantings include an English-style and two small formal gardens, collections of state champion trees, lilacs, unusual oaks, 110 willow species, and 20,000 planted conifers, mature exotic trees, and a Cypress Pool Garden.
Longview Road, Chester Township, 973/326-7600 Morris County Park Commission

Frelinghuysen Arboretum
A 127-acre estate with grand trees, formal demonstration gardens, pond garden, rose, rock, and cottage gardens, vegetable and children's gardens, extensive plantings of ornamental grasses, creative potted tropicals, perennials and annuals, woodland with trails, and gallery. The estate, a dairy farm owned by Sara Ballantine and George Frelinghuysen, president of Ballantine Beer at the turn of the 20th century, is on the National Register of Historic Places.
East Hanover Avenue, Morristown, 973/326-7600 Arboretum Friends

Hammond Wildflower Trail
Almost 250 varieties of native wild flowers and shrubs abound along a one-mile trail through woods, beside a stream and bog. The planted, one-acre native garden is enclosed to keep it deer-proof and plants are labeled for interested gardeners. Springtime flowers include several trillium species, yellow and pink lady's slippers, and other wild flowers native to the Northeast with an emphasis on northern New Jersey. Trails include Fern Walk, Swamp and Trillium Walk.
Tourne Park, McCaffrey Lane, Boonton 973/326-7600 Morris County Park Commission

Wick Kitchen Herb Garden and Farm
A one-acre reconstructed 1777 kitchen herb and vegetable garden. Heirloom apple orchard is surrounded by national park woodland with trails. Herbs tended by women in period dress.
Morristown National Historic Park /Jockey Hollow Section, Harding Township 973/539-2085

Somerset County

Colonial Park and Gardens

Rudolph van der Goot garden, Franklin Twp., Somerset County

This 685-acre park contains 144 acres of gardens including The Rudolph W. van der Goot Rose Garden, one of the most well-known rose gardens in the country. As an All-American Display Garden, over 3,000 roses of 325 varieties blossom in a formal setting. The garden was named after the Park Commission's first horticulturist. Adjacent to the rose garden, a Fragrance and Sensory Garden is wheel-chair height and easily accessible with Braille labels. Five acres of perennial and shrub gardens heighten the experience of visiting the Arboretum's labeled trees.
Mettlers Road, Franklin Township 908/873-2459 Somerset Parks

Cross Estate
The gardens on this 162-acre once-private estate were designed and planted by Mrs. Cross, a member of the Royal Horticultural Society and president of the New York Horticultural Society, between 1929 and 1940. Special gardens include a formal walled garden, shade garden with native plants, ferns, and perennials, a mountain laurel allee, statuary, 200-foot wisteria-covered pergola, rhododendron gardens, and an interesting 100-year-old water tower/windmill.
Morristown National Historic Park, Old Jockey Hollow Road, Bernardsville, 973/539-2016

Leonard J. Buck Garden
This is one of the premier rock gardens on the East Coast. Carved from a glacial stream valley, the 33-acre garden features planted rock outcroppings and woodland trails lined with native and exotic wild flowers, shrubs and trees. Rock faces, fields, a stream and pond support alpines, rock plants, and other unusual cultivated natives, rare exotics, and wild flora. Special gardens include collections of azaleas, ferns, epimediums, and a heath and heather garden planted in large raised beds. The garden was once part of the estate of geologist Leonard J. Buck who, with landscape architect Zenon Schreiber, dynamited the land to expose the rock in the late 1930s.
11 Layton Rd, Far Hills, 908/234-2677 Somerset Parks

Warren County

Butterfly and Hummingbird Garden
Butterfly Garden is made to order. Brightly colored flowers supply nectar, and there are lots of herbs to attract flying beauties. Other plants offer foliage for caterpillars. Beyond the garden there are 2,800 acres with trails through exquisite habitats and views, an old orchard, and 90-acre environmental preserve with wildlife observation area.
Merrill Creek Reservoir, 34 Merrill Creek Road, Washington, 908/454-1213

Karen Nash Memorial Butterfly Garden
Located at Memorial Elementary School, the quarter-acre garden open daily, spring, summer and fall, sunrise to sunset. The pathways are wheelchair accessible. Group tours and photographers welcome.
300 West Stewart St., Washington, 908/689-7771

Pequest Butterfly Garden
Walk through a garden of annuals, herbs, and wild plants such as clover, milkweed, and puddling station where butterflies remove water from wet sand. Also, enjoy maintained wild gardens with native plants and acres of fields of native grasses, maintained for general wildlife habitat for cover and food. Some grasses are six feet tall. Walk through woods and fields in various stages of succession; visit a fishing pond where kingfishers, an occasional eagle and osprey dip to catch dinner.
Pequest Enviromnemtal Education Center, 605 Pequest Road off Rt. 46, Oxford 908/637-4125

Well-Sweep Herb Farm
This half-acre privately-owned garden is home to one of the largest collections of herbs in the country as well as a knot garden, topiary standards, scented geraniums. Cyrus Hyde, who runs the farm with wife Louise and son David, grew up in a tradition of herbal remedies passed down from an ancestral grandmother who treated Washington's troop.205 Mount Bethel Road, Port Murray, 908/852-5390 website

Other Resources

Public Gardens

Garden Conservancy, 888/842-2442