Four Seasons Garden

Highlights

• Seasonal garden areas showing plants in their season of greatest interest – Spring, Summer, Fall, Winter
• More than 80 plants chosen for multi-season interest and minimal maintenance
• Variety of plants including small trees, shrubs, and perennials of varied heights

Take an audio tour:

“To everything there is a season, and a time to every purpose under the heaven.” This biblical Ecclesiastes verse describes the Four Seasons Garden filled with plants that showcase their attributes through seasonal change. Growth, budding, flowering, fruiting, and seeding – each plant phase drawn forth by seasonal changes in moisture, light and temperature. The garden is drawn by design into quadrants; each representing a season: to the south are plants that have showy attributes in the spring; to the east you will see plants with autumnal color; summer plants are showy in the northern most quadrant, and to the west there are plants that add color and structural interest during the winter. This is a good garden to visit when you’re trying to find a plant to add interest in your own landscape during a particular season.

One important goal in this garden is to use plants that are not generally seen in other theme gardens of the Demonstration Garden. This provides you, the visitor, with a wider plant selection to see and you have the opportunity to see how the plants look together during a particular season of the year.

Another consideration has been to select cultivars that will “play nicely” with its neighbors. This means the team chooses non-aggressive, and non-invasive plant varieties. If you like a particular plant for its color but are afraid it may take over your garden, or if it is a known invasive plant, look for a different cultivar of the plant or a different one entirely that has a similar shape and color.

In this garden, efforts were made to use plants or cultivars not typically seen in the rest of the Garden. Cultivars are a specially cultivated ‘variety’ of a plant that most often is produced naturally.

Plants with high maintenance requirements, high susceptibility for disease, or invasive tendencies were avoided. For example, although asters bloom well in Fall, they are also susceptible to powdery mildew with overhead watering. Since overhead watering is used in this garden, asters haven’t been planted. Invasive plants such as yucca, and heavy re-seeders such as allium and Jupiter’s Beard have not been used. The quantity of day lilies in this garden have been reduced due to their maintenance needs (deadheading, foliage cleanup, and susceptibility to snails).

Care for this garden includes over-head irrigation that provides water two times a week. Weeds are hand-picked and kept to a minimum with bark mulch. Fertilizer is added only as needed to maintain healthy plants and Integrated Pest Management is used in this garden as well as with all the gardens in the Demonstration Garden.

Our goal in this garden is to share plants with visitors that will potentially increase the year-around interest in their individual gardens.

See the other gardens