Vermont Gardens

Cider Hill Gardens: 1747 Hunt Road, Windsor, VT 05089 (802)674-6825.

• This commercial nursery with display gardens and an art gallery specializes in woodland flowers, primroses, peonies, daylillies and hostas and offers plant talks and guided garden tours.

Equinox Valley Nursery: Historic Route 7A, Manchester, VT (802)362-2610.

• This retail nursery and landscaping business offers a tropical conservatory and display gardens.

Greatwood Gardens: Goddard College, 123 Pitkin Road, Plainfield, VT 05667 (802)454-8311.

• The college is situated on the former Greatwood Farms Estate which included professionally landscaped gardens.

Gardens at Hildene: Historic Route 7A, P.O. Box 377, Manchester, VT 05254 (802) 362-1788.

• Abraham Lincoln's oldest son, Robert Todd Lincoln, built this Georgian Revival manor house overlooking the Battenkill Valley. The formal gardens, designed by his daughter Jessie Lincoln Beckwith, replicate a stained glass Gothic cathedral window with privet hedges and peonies, roses, lilies and other flowers. Period cutting and kitchen gardens have also been restored at the site.
  

Little Siberia Perennials:  966 Maston Hill Road, Granville, VT  05747 (802)767-3391.

• Located in the mountains at 1600 feet elevation, Zone 3 and 4 hardy perennials, heathers, shrubs, and roses are displayed in over 20 gardens at our retail nursery.  Stroll through islands of color set against one of Vermont’s most dramatic backdrops.

Morrill Homestead:  214 Justin Morrill Memorial Highway, Strafford, Vermont 05072 (802)765-4388.

• This homestead of a former US Senator, now a National Historic Site, includes recently restored gardens with special woody plants, a pleasure garden, and kitchen/flower gardens. Although his avocation of landscape gardening was cut short by his entry into politics in 1854, Morrill's designs and plantings for the walkways and the gardens surrounding the house are in the best tradition of the romantic landscape movement in America and the original plantings, selected to test suitability to the harsh Vermont climate, survive, including species from Europe and the Orient.

Park McCullough House: Corner Park & West Streets, P.O. Box 388, North Bennington, VT 05257 (802)442-5441.

• This French Empire style mansion, home to two of Vermont's Governors, offers beautifully landscaped gardens and grounds.

Rocky Dale Gardens: 62 Rocky Dale Road, Bristol, VT 05443 (802)453-2782.

• This retail nursery, situated in a vale amidst rock ledges, offers display gardens with common and unusual trees and plants.

 Shelburne Farms: 1611 Harbor Road, Shelburne, VT 05482 (802)985-8686.

• This 1886 model agricultural estate, now an environmental education center, was created by William Seward and Lila Vanderbilt Webb with architect Robert H. Robertson and landscape architect Frederick Law Olmsted. The naturalistically landscaped grounds, optimizing vistas of Lake Champlain, include a garden at the magnificent house and a market garden. Be sure to visit the amazing barn!

Shelburne Museum: Route 7, Shelburne, VT 05482 (802)985-3346.

• Founded in 1947 by Electra Havemeyer Webb, a collector of every kind of Americana from circus figurines to buildings to a paddlewheel steamer, this wonderful 45 acre museum features over 35 historic buildings placed in a park-like setting designed by Umberto Innocenti. Gardens include the Apothecary Herb Garden (medicinal herbs), the Hat and Fragrance Textile Gallery Garden (culinary herbs and plants for dyes), the Electra Bostwick Memorial Garden (annuals, perennials and roses arranged like an artist's palette), the Pleissner Gallery Garden, and collections of lilacs (400 bushes of 90 varieties) and crabapples (200 trees).

Standing Stone Perennial Farm: 36 Johnson Hill Road, South Royalton, VT 05068 (802)763-8243.

• Colorful ornamental gardens and propagration beds brimming with over 700 varieties of hardy perennials and herbs surround a hillside farmhouse in this family-owned nursery. Against a backdrop of the Green Mountains, features include unique standing stone, ponds, a stone circle, a large sundial and chessboard.

University of Vermont Horticultural Research Center: Green Mountain Drive, South Burlington, VT (802)658-9166 (Manager) or (802)864-3073 (Friends).

• The 97 acre "Hort. Farm" displays 700 kinds of ornamental trees and shrubs, many of them uncommon or unique. Special collections include apples, crabapples (210 specimens of 135 varieties), lilacs (90 varieties), junipers (60 varieties), and a labelled perennial display border.

Vermont Garden Park (formerly called the Vermont Community Botanical Garden): Corner of Dorset and Swift Streets, South Burlington, VT (802)863-5251 x123.

• Home to the National Gardening Association, this 20 acre new botanical garden features a butterfly garden, a community garden, a children's garden, ademonstration garden, an ethnic heritage garden, a wildlife garden, a vegetable and herb garden, an All-America Selections garden, a secret garden and a maze. Additional features are an orchard, rose garden, multiple greenhouses, amphitheater, lawns, and a library.  

Vermont Wildflower Farm: 4750 Shelburne Road (Route 7 at Ferry Road), Charlotte, VT 05445 (802)425-3641 (855)846-9453.

• This wildflower seed company's headquarters offers paths with signs through two flower fields and a woodland with a brook and pond.