New Jersey Botanical Garden at Skylands
Botanical Garden · Ringwood, New Jersey
Ninety-six acres of formal and woodland gardens around a 1920s Tudor Revival manor in the Ramapo Mountains, and THE OFFICIAL BOTANICAL GARDEN OF THE STATE OF NEW JERSEY since 1984. Clarence Lewis, a stockbroker with a serious plantsman's eye, spent thirty years and a great deal of money collecting specimens here from six continents, and the bones of that collection survive — a half-mile Crab Apple Vista, a Magnolia Walk, an Azalea Garden and a Moraine Garden built on glacial rubble. SKYLANDS MANOR ITSELF, by John Russell Pope, is only occasionally open, which catches visitors out.
2 Morris Road, Ringwood, New Jersey, 07456, United States
THE GARDEN IS FREE TO ENTER BUT PARKING IS CHARGED on weekends and holidays from roughly Memorial Day to Labor Day, and is free at other times — the reverse of what most visitors expect. Open daily, generally 8:00 until dusk. No booking needed for the gardens. SKYLANDS MANOR IS OPEN ONLY ON OCCASIONAL SCHEDULED TOUR DAYS and is otherwise hired out for weddings and events — check the calendar if the house is the reason you are coming, because it is not a house museum. THERE IS NO GLASSHOUSE OR CONSERVATORY and no wet-weather refuge. Ringwood Manor, elsewhere in the same state park, charges its own modest admission and keeps its own days. Black bears are resident.
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