Visit Mt. Cuba Center

Rolling hills and perfect rural Delaware vistas lead to a simple sign and gate that opens to the Mt. Cuba Center.  It’s vast and quiet.  A huge historic home anchors the 600-acre property.

Walking pathways southward takes you through a series of inspiring gardens.  Delicate carpets of flowers under tall trees seem home to pixies or fairies.  It is a magical enchanted forest.  Naturalistic plantings create a sense of wonder rather than order and formality conveyed by many public gardens.

Mt. Cuba Center is a public garden and research center near Wilmington, Delaware.  The center studies and conserves plant life native to a large swatch of rolling land stretching from Pennsylvania into Alabama called the Appalachian Piedmont region.

The gardens show off our native belles.  And yes, there are ubiquitous trilliums.

Mt. Cuba is another of the our nearby gardens with ties to the Du Pont family.

Perhaps it was the day I was there, since it couldn’t have been a more perfect spring day.  Or perhaps it was the entertaining group of people I was there with, but of the public gardens I’ve toured, I found Mt. Cuba among the very best.

It could be my taste for naturalistic plantings or my preference for simplistic style but I’d take another trip to Mt. Cuba before another jaunt to Longwood Gardens.  This may not be a fair comparison since the two are so very different.  Longwood has the elaborate European influenced formal gardens with the stunning conservatory.

Mt. Cuba has a natural elegance and relies on woodland flower plantings for the wow.  I think you have to see both.  But see both.  Don’t leave Mt. Cuba off your list of nearby gardens to enjoy.

Just FYI, folks who know my preference in landscapes tell me I WILL FALL over when I see Winterthur, which another Delaware public Garden with ties to the Du Pont family, that, like Mt. Cuba showcases native plants.  So I don’t mean to leave out Winterthur, I just haven’t seen it.  Soon…. Very soon…