Brookside Gardens

Brookside Gardens (500 acres) are public gardens located within Wheaton Regional Park, at 1800 Glenallan Avenue, Silver Spring, Maryland. The gardens themselves are open daily without charge. However, certain annual events there are held that may charge a nominal fee.

Major features of the garden are as follows:

• Aquatic Garden – water-loving plants with two ponds and gazebo.

Gude Garden teahouse

Exhibit at Nature Center

• Azalea Garden – over 300 varieties of azaleas represented by 2,000 plants. Also rhododendrons, witchhazels, hollies, Japanese andromeda, sweet-box, skimmia, and shade-tolerant perennials.
• Butterfly Garden – Seasonal in summer only. Admission fee.
• Children’s “Fairy Folk” Garden
• Conservatories – seasonal displays and special exhibits. The surrounding garden contains a collection of unusual conifers and groundcovers.
• Fragrance Garden
• Gude Garden – a Japanese-style landscape with bamboo, beech, unusual conifers, dogwood, and groundcovers, as well as an island teahouse overlooking the ponds.
• Maple Terrace – raised beds within a planting of ‘Suminagashi’ Japanese maples.
• a Japanese teahouse overlooking a pond stocked with koi (try clapping your hands when in the center of this!).
• Nature center – with exhibits on local wildlife. Parking lot has a separate entrance.
• Perennial Garden – wisterias, roses, Jasmine stephanense, buddleia, and Prunus x cistena, allium, geranium, sedum, panicum, lespedeza, calamagrostis, anemones, asters, acanthus, and agastache, etc.
• Reflection Terrace – a memorial to the ten individuals killed in October, 2002 by the Washington snipers.

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  The Sniper Memorial at Brookside Gardens

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  Names of victims at the Sniper Memorial

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  View from the Reflection Terrace over the Aquatic Garden

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  Close-up of the inscription at the pond at the Reflection Terrace

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  Dedication Plaque at the Reflection Terrace

• Rock Garden – spring flowering bulbs with grasses and conifers.
• Rose Garden – all types of roses, including hybrid tea, rugosa hybrids, grandiflora, English, miniature, floribunda, shrub, groundcover, polyantha, climber, Gallica, hybrid musk, and the garden rose.
• Trial Garden – spring flowering bulbs, then summer displays of new and unusual plant varieties,.
• Woodland Walk – forested wetland with bald cypress, tulip poplar, spicebush, and groundcover of mayapple, fern, and skunk cabbage. A native plant garden includes approximately 124 species and cultivars of Maryland native plants.
• Yew Garden – a garden room within yew hedges.

See also

• List of botanical gardens in the United States

External links

• Brookside Gardens
• Brookside Nature Center