Mill Pond Garden Open Day, Sunday, June 23rd, 2024, 10 AM to 12 PM

Mill Pond Garden celebrates the flowers of the solstice with an Open Day on Sunday, June 23, 2024 from 10 AM to noon. Ticket is $18 per car with up to six passengers.

Tickets are not refundable and may be given as a gift.

This only local public botanical garden features plants, especially flowering plants that do well in the Cape region. Visitors may expect to see in bloom abundant hydrangeas (most species and kinds) at peak, roses, crape myrtles, daylilies, tall phlox, pollinator plants including milkweed, lilies, clematis, lavender, hibiscus, Vitex, sunflowers, waterlilies, Benary’s Giant Zinnias, hummingbirds, butterflies, annuals, perennials, and more. The bog garden includes plants that eat insects like pitcher plants and Venus fly traps. The resident three-year-old native wild snapping turtle ‘Allie’ may be seen. The distinguished collection in the epiphyte garden (epiphytes are air plants with few or no roots that grow on tree limbs) includes American tropicals native from Georgia south to Central America with orchids, bromeliads, Tillandsias, epiphytic ferns and cactus, and much more, even a ground bromeliad Pineapple.

Mill Pond Garden fronts on Red Mill Pond for the enjoyment of picturesque views not only of boaters and fishers, but also of the abundant wildlife including basking huge turtles, Osprey, Bald Eagle, cormorants, gulls, several kinds of ducks, geese, occasional swans, great blue heron

green heron, and more.  The garden includes rabbits, numerous land birds, many nesting, squirrels, koi fish, an occasional box turtle, and a variety of frogs as well as butterflies, dragonflies damselflies, and interesting pollinator bees and insects.

There are over two thousand feet of pathways through many different garden rooms, many water features like fountains, stream, ponds, waterfalls, and some reptiles resident, on occasion visible. Cameras are welcome. The gardens are mostly quite accessible to wheelchairs with a pusher. Visitors extol the garden constantly, (a Google 5-star rating) one called it a ‘gem in the crown’ of the Cape region.  Public gardens are important treasured educational assets to the communities lucky enough to have one.