Gardens

Love gardening and all things related? Well, here are some Camden area garden related venues for you to enjoy:

Enjoying a latitude and climate like the British Isles, spectacular gardens abound, both public and private. A stroll down any street reveals just how seriously the art of gardening is taken around here!

Each season in Maine is a treasure. However, after a long, cold winter, a Maine spring is a true gift to the senses. As the earth warms, the beauty of awakening gardens renews the soul. Mid-coast Maine and the Camden area offers an exceptional number of beautiful places from private gardens to botanical parks to see Mother Nature doing her best to impress!

Gardening enthusiasts may want to add an additional day to their visit just to enjoy these spectacular places and events. There are cottage gardens, woodland gardens, seaside gardens, formal and informal gardens. Window boxes overflow, street lights are festooned with baskets of trailing flowers, and legendary gardens are just a peek over a fence or gate away!

The work of some of America’s most renowned landscape architects; Frederick Law Olmstead, Fletcher Steele, Warren Manning & Charles Eliot are represented in places like Camden’s beautiful Harbor Park and Bok Amphitheater. In early Spring, lawns full of crocuses give way to drifts of daffodils, tulips, and Lilac bushes, from pale to deep purple, seem to grace & scent every antique dooryard.

Then follows a procession of perennials…peonies, hydrangeas, fox-glove, and fields of nodding daisies. But the true star of Maine’s garden season and one of Maine’s best-kept secrets is Lupine season! This is a magical two to three-week span in mid-June when every meadow, roadside ditch, and hill-side is covered in the iconic blue, pink and white spires that turns every bend in the road into a scene from an Impressionist painting! Even Maine’s most breath-taking vistas are improved by a stand of these dazzling flowers. So beloved are these plants that thrive in our cool, sea and pine-scented air, and acidic soil, that farmers will not mow their fields until the Lupines have set their seed!

To see Maine in the first three weeks of June is to see Maine at one the prettiest times of the year. In a word…unforgettable! July and August continue to deliver with a dazzling array of wild Rugosa Roses, daylilies, stands of lavender, and mallow. Be sure not to miss the ever-popular Camden Garden Club House and Garden Tour held annually on the third Thursday of July, just before the weekend of Harbor Arts Festival. It is not unusual to see artist’s set up with easels to capture someone’s paint-worth cottage garden. In the cooler days of Fall, Black-Eyed Susans dot the meadows, and asters, mums, and sunflowers compliment the colors of the turning leaves.

Some of the great places to see Maine gardens at their best are:

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