Best Places to Visit in NY: Stonecrop Gardens in Cold Spring

© Stonecrop Gardens

Established in 1958 when Garden Conservancy founder Frank Cabot and his wife, Anne built their home on 60 acres of wooded land high on a hilltop outside Cold Spring, Stonecrop began as a private garden. Unfazed by the rocky ground and strong winds, the garden featured a variety of alpine plants, and, as the garden grew, several new and experimental plants, too. With a mission to “inspire gardeners to explore the endless and diverse variety of the plant kingdom and to encourage experimentation in the garden,” Stonecrop became a public garden in 1992 and has been delighting visitors ever since.

© Stonecrop Gardens

Stonecrop features a diverse and inspiring variety of display gardens made up of a collection of gardens and plants, including raised alpine stone beds, a grass garden, woodland and water gardens, cliff rock gardens, and a sheltered English-style flower garden. Stonecrop is also home to several greenhouses, including a large Conservatory, small Tropical Room, an exclusive Alpine House, and a Pit House with an extensive collection of choice dwarf bulbs. There are also two growing greenhouses on site.

Stonecrop features several different plant habitats and the species which thrive in them, ranging from a 2,000 square-foot conservatory housing tender specimens such as orchids and tropical, to raised alpine stone beds and woodlands and water gardens. Other highlights of the gardens include a cliff rock garden, an enclosed English-style flower garden, greenhouses of alpine and succulents, and systematically ordered beds representing over 50 plant families. A new T-Range Greenhouse houses half-hardy plants through the winter, which are then mixed with hardy perennials, annuals, vines, and shrubs to create spectacular displays in the flower gardens. The gardens are open all year round and provide inspiration through all the seasons from blooming bulbs in the spring and explosions of color in the summer to spectacular foliage in the fall.

© Stonecrop Gardens

Stonecrop Gardens is located on Stonecrop Lane in Cold Spring, approximately 55 miles north of New York City on Route 301. The gardens are open Monday through Saturday from 10:00 am to 5:00 pm, as well as select Sundays between the months of April and November.

Stonecrop offers an Internship Program for students and learners who wish to learn how to grow care for and use plants in a garden setting. The goal of the course is to provide students with invaluable practical horticultural exposure and experience, as well as all the horticultural skills necessary to become a professional in the field. The internship offers a ‘hands-on’ approach where students become interactively involved in the running and maintain the garden, learning new skills along the way.

Activities and responsibilities in the program include Ornamental Horticulture (planting, mulching, weeding, dead-heading, pruning, pest and disease identification, and management, labeling, mapping, record keeping, and selling and public relations), Propagation of alpine, woodland, and flower garden plants, and Greenhouse Management. Other duties include soil preparation and compost production, watering (indoor and outdoor), rotating household tasks, and rotating weekend duty. Students take part in various internal projects while on the program, including a designing, installing, and maintaining a vegetable plot, plant identification tests, lecture presentations on a horticultural topic of choice and partaking in various field trips. The Stonecrop Internship Program runs from February through December and includes a full 40-hour work week with alternating weekend duties.

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81 Stonecrop Lane, Cold Spring, New York 10516, website, Phone: 845-265-2000