Horticultural Gardens
The Horticultural Gardens and Displays at The Arboretum provide year-round color and change throughout each season. Here you will see a large and diverse collection of plants from around the globe.
We partner with horticultural clubs and groups, UK professionals and plant breeders to bring the newest selections of annuals, perennials, roses, trees and shrubs to our gardens. You will find many of these inter-planted with proven favorites that thrive here in the Bluegrass.
The gardens at The Arboretum are designed to stimulate your olfactory and visual senses – fragrances, colors, textures and forms abound – and are a contemplative place to observe the natural environment and provide inspiration.
The Horticultural Gardens are composed of a collection of smaller gardens: the Home Demonstration Garden (further divided into garden rooms such as Woodland Shade Garden, Pond Garden, Herb Garden, Vegetable Garden, Pollinator Garden, etc.), the Flight 5191 Memorial Rose Garden, the Fragrance Garden, the Perennial Teaching Garden, the Witch Hazel Dell, and displays along paths throughout the core garden area surrounding the Dorotha Smith Oatts Visitor Center.
Home Demonstration Garden
The four-acre Home Demonstration Garden was the first feature developed at The Arboretum in the early 1990s from a conceptual design by Environmental Planning and Design, Pittsburgh. The garden is separated into different "rooms" that illustrate a specific theme, aiming to provide gardeners, homeowners and students with home gardening ideas. We look for plants that require fewer inputs (water, fertilizer, maintenance, etc.) and are visually appealing so that you can create a beautiful and diverse environment in your home garden. We exhibit a varied collection of plants, including cultivars derived from native plants and noninvasive exotic plants found all over the world that can work well for Bluegrass homeowners.
Memorial Rose Garden
We have approximately 100 different rose cultivars and seek to grow roses that can withstand Kentucky's temperature extremes and the continuing presence and devastating effects of Rose Rosette Disease. The Arboretum trials roses for American Garden Rose Selections and Star Roses to test some of their newest roses for performance and disease resistance. The garden contains vine- and rose-covered pergolas, a dry-laid stone wall and a cobblestone walk that leads to 49 stainless steel birds in flight over a base of black granite. This sculpture, created by Douwe Blumberg, is the focal point of the Memorial Rose Garden and commemorates those who lost their lives in the Flight 5191 accident at Bluegrass Airport on August 27, 2006.
Fragrance Garden
The Fragrance Garden is a bridge between the Home Demonstration Garden and the Rose Garden. It is lined with wooden columns covered in climbing roses, and has winding trails, rows of lavender and espaliered fruit trees. This garden has a Mediterranean feel that makes it unique at The Arboretum and contains some of our oldest heirloom roses whose delightful fragrances reigned supreme and color was secondary. It also contains a wide assortment of herbs and other plants known for their fragrance. There are several mulched trails for visitors to get up close and personal with a myriad of fragrances, such as citrus, roses and lavender. This garden is sure to awaken and stimulate your olfactory glands, so be sure to stop and smell the roses – literally!
Perennial Teaching Garden
During the spring of 2020, the grounds crew was hard at work preparing for and planting the new Perennial Teaching Garden. This one-acre garden is planted with over 150 cultivars of sun-loving perennials and 50 species of native perennial plants. The garden is designed to display some old favorites as well as new releases. Plants are arranged alphabetically in beds with several species like Achillea, Agastache, Allium and Amsonia interplanted to give the look of a mixed perennial border. The garden is home to the Bluegrass Iris Society's iris display and the recently added daylily collection from the Research and Education Center at Princeton.
Dye Garden
Depending on geography, weather patterns and time of harvest, each plant has the potential to produce a color that can vary greatly from other plants of the same species. In 2022, Shari Dutton, Department of Horticulture, and Crystal Gregory, School of Art and Visual Studies, developed the Dye Garden. In the spring, native and nonnative plants were planted, and through the fall, they were harvested and their dye color tested. They successfully produced a variety of natural plant colors for textiles ranging from blues and greens to yellows, reds and pinks.
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Visitor Center Plantings
The Dorotha Smith Oatts Visitor Center plantings have become a creation all their own, designed to provide waves of color throughout the seasons. Beds around the Visitor Center are planted with thousands of spring blooming bulbs, followed by a riot of summer annuals blending with trees, shrubs and perennials. The big show starts in March with daffodils and other bulbs paired with pansy, violas, lettuce, kale and Swiss chard. Through the peak of summer bloom, brightly colored zinnias, marigolds, daylilies and multicolored sweet potato vines appear, and the show continues until mid-November with salvias, asters, goldenrod and ornamental grasses.
