After years of hearing about the Oregon Gardens from garden club members, my husband and I finally visited this garden located in the charming town of Silverton, 12 miles NE of Salem, Oregon. The Oregon Gardens is a lovely 80-acre botanical garden featuring twenty themed gardens, many with water features and sculptures and it has a historic Frank Lloyd Wright house, called The Gordon House. When we arrived we first took the narrated tram tour. The driver told us the garden’s history and pointed out each featured garden and interesting facts. She explained that the wetland area in the gardens is used to cool the City of Silverton’s effluent water.  The water moves through a series of pools and is used to irrigate the gardens before it’s returned to the local river. We were impressed! After the tram tour, we purchased iced chai-tea from the Little Leaf Café in the visitor’s center, and then walked through the gardens using a brochure map to guide us.  The Conifer Garden was grand and we could have stayed here for hours, but we still had to visit: the Bosque Grove, the Sensory Garden, the Rose Garden, the Children’s Garden, the Medicinal Garden, the Garden Market Garden, the Tropical Greenhouse, and the water features. Picnicking is encouraged at the gardens, so we ate our lunch at a picnic table surrounded by trees and flowers. The garden is pet-friendly, too, there’s even a pet-friendly demonstration garden. I couldn’t leave without purchasing a plant from the retail nursery, so I bought a Dicliptera suberecta also known as a firecracker plant or hummingbird plant. This plant is a deer-resistant drought-tolerant herbaceous perennial with felty blueish-grey leaves that blooms early summer into fall. It has   clusters of tubular orange flowers that are a hummingbird’s delight!  It’s winter hardy in USDA Zone 8-10, and needs full sun. Visit the Oregon Gardens, you’ll love it. ~Carlotta Lucas Read more about the Oregon Gardens https://www.oregongarden.org/about/

Photo above was provided by the Oregon Gardens Website Photos below were taken by Carlotta Lucas, AGC Member