Idea Garden

A brick walkway with a wooden bench winds through green garden beds with fountains in the distance
Style
Creative, Inspiring, Varied
Best Seasons to Visit
Spring, Summer, Autumn
Scale
6 Acres

In the Idea Garden—home to five unique garden spaces, including our recently redesigned Ornamental Kitchen Garden—we bring horticultural inspiration closer to home, showcasing a range of educational, experimental approaches to gardening and design, and using plant varieties that can be reliably grown by home gardeners in the mid-Atlantic region.

Echoing some of the classical elements of the Main Fountain Garden, blending the formal with the less formal and notably the agrarian, pathways lead the way to sections dedicated to annuals, perennials, vegetables, fruits, herbs, and more. With a nod to the Brandywine Valley, traditional bedding plants are combined with swaying grasses, handcrafted support structures, and other eclectic elements that showcase our gardeners’ passion for plants and creativity. We recommend you bring along your camera—and make time to take lots of notes!

About This Garden

Annual Corridor 

Look for an ever-changing palette of color in this evolving space featuring tropical, hardy, and flowering plants. Bulbs take center stage in the spring, while annual flowers bloom continuously throughout the summer months into fall. This space is often used to showcase new and exciting plants that are available commercially, as well as ways to enliven outdoor spaces both large and small. Form and repetition are key to the designs, creating a coordinated vista of sun-bright hues and artful combinations.

Combination Garden

This dynamic garden space is used specifically to showcase artful botanical combinations. Witness the natural succession of blooming, receding, setting seed, and renewal for every stage of life for herbaceous plants. Featuring shrubs, perennials, annuals, bulbs, and small flowering trees, this garden brings new learning and discovery for the home gardener, season after season. 

Ornamental Kitchen Garden

Vegetables, fruits, and herbs are beautiful and bountiful in our recently reimagined and redesigned Ornamental Kitchen Garden, dedicated to growing vegetables since 1927. In this space, which tells an agricultural story that food production is an important part of horticulture and supports the growth and production of more than 200 rotating fruit, vegetable, and herb crops each year, find inspiration for your own culinary garden in varieties both common and unusual. While exploring its rows of crops to espaliered fruit trees to cut flowers, learn techniques for growing crops in a small space and for handcrafting sculptural arches, trellises, and domes to create a playful area that celebrates the beauty of these plants.

Perennial Border

We like to think of this garden as a living plant catalog—one which doubles as an immersive (and gorgeous) study guide for our Continuing Education students. Featuring a variety of herbaceous sun- and shade-loving perennials, the textures, colors, and forms look spectacular in every season.

Student Exhibition Garden

Designed and maintained by the students in our two-year Professional Horticulture program, the Student Exhibition Garden surprises and delights. The students are responsible for designing and planting a garden within a given budget, sticking to the provided course themes and design requirements.