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Directions to Leaming's Run Gardens
See Leaming's Run Gardens in the Video "Great Places in South Jersey"
Watch hummingbird video (In the month of August, each year, Leaming's Run is the Hummingbird Capital of the East Coast!)

Leaming's Run Gardens has more than just flowers!
This delightful place also has goats, chickens, hummingbirds, and a colonial farmstead museum--and your kids may walk on the grass!

Leaming's Run Gardens is the largest annual garden in the United States. Actually, it's not just a garden, but a series of 22 separate theme gardens along a walking path. Each garden has its own theme, such as a colonial garden, an English garden, and a garden of different flowers all one color.

Jack Aprill and his wife Emily have an interesting philosophy about Leaming's Run: first, these gardens are informal, just the opposite of gardens where the plants are cultivated in hothouses and kept in pots, never planted in the ground; in Leaming's Run, everything you see has been started from seeds and has been planted in terra firma. Next, since Mr. Aprill says that 'less work is best', feeding and weed control are accomplished with grass clippings and spent flowers, rather than fertilizers and chemicals. Speaking of grass and the Leaming's Run philosophy, this sign, "YOU MAY WALK ON THE GRASS" tells everyone this is a place to relax and enjoy.
sign: YOU MAY WALK ON THE GRASS
There is more here than just flowers. Let's take a quick tour of Leaming's Run Gardens to see what's there:

We begin our tour by walking through the woods.This wooded path begins the garden walk

waterIn the woods, we see a small stream.
Much of the stream called Leaming's Run is located underground, just beneath the gardens, and provides constant natural irrigation.

As we leave the woods, we enter the first garden:entering clearing

Here are a few of the 22 separate theme gardens that we find as we continue our walk down the path:
 
 
yellow flowers against a blue sky   garden
     
line of flowers on sloping lawn   In a Summer Garden
     
  blue strawflowers
And here are some of the individual flowers and plants we saw:
blue flowers   yellow prickly pear flower
     
delightfully red flowers   the odd blue flower
     
the underground stream waters many different varieties of fern   honeysuckle is one of the best smells in a garden!
     
red flowers with a distinctive white pattern   yellow flowers

Don't these flowers look a bit like a Van Gogh painting?
with a little imagination, these yellow blooms look like the painter Van Gogh's sunflowers

After walking through a number of gardens, you come upon a small cabin. This is a reproduction of the temporary house that the Thomas Leaming family used while their permanent house was built in 1706. The cabin is a small museum showing what life was like for the original owner.
 
 
cabin interior   cabin interior: bed and long gun on wall

 
 

Next to the cabin is a small farm, typical for the early 1700's. Here, you'll find chickens and goats and vegetable gardens.
 
 
picture of a rooster picture of a goat
 

 In August of each year, Leaming's Run Gardens becomes a haven for hummingbirds migrating south to Central America. This is a wonderful time to visit!
two hummingbirds interactingLeaming's Run Gardens is so full of hummingbirds in August of each year, it's called the Hummingbird Capital of the East Coast!

Watch a hummingbird video on your monitor, click below!  See a hummingbird hover and turn in mid-air. It's in slow motion, so you can see every beat of its wings!

(it takes a long time to download, but if your computer is like mine, once you get it downloaded the first time, you can go back and watch it whenever you like, and it starts up immediately - try it!)

Approximate Download times:
 
 
14.4K modem
 - 13 minutes
28.8k modem
 - 7 minutes
56K modem
 - 3.5 minutes
a good DSL connection (cable modem similar)
 - 16 seconds

To start the download, click here!

....or, just click on YouTube below for a hummingbird sipping nectar from Jewelweed flowers, one of their favorites!
 

the quiet gazebo
 
 

The gazebo is a favorite place to sit quietly and just feel the magic around you.

Leaming's Run phone number for hours, admission cost:  (609) 465-5871  

Directions to Leaming's Run Gardens

Back to What's to Do in NJSouth

Experience Leaming's Run Gardens in the Video "Great Places in South Jersey"

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© 2008 Clay Mikolasy, Producer of "Great Places in South Jersey" 

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02/09/2008