THE GARDEN CONSERVANCY’S OPEN DAYS 2020

I saw visions of ‘spring blooming bulbs’ dancing in my head when I checked out The Garden Conservancy’s Open Days 2020 listing! Begun in 1995, Open Days is The Garden Conservancy’s national garden-visiting program—their best-known and most popular program.

In 2020, they’re celebrating 25 years of Open Days: 25 years of opening more than 4,000 gardens in 41 states, welcoming more than 1.3 million visitors to enjoy some of America’s most exciting, creative, and inspiring private gardens. In addition to opening their gardens to visitors, many Open Days garden hosts also offer “Garden Extras”: plant sales, guided tours, book-signings, and additional activities. Garden Extras are free with garden admission.

Since 2015, Open Days has also offered a series of Digging Deeper programs—informal but educational talks and demonstrations with experts from every facet of the garden world: landscape architects, plant collectors, artists, and more. I had the pleasure of leading one of these programs a few years ago in the Boston area.

The 2020 Open Days season includes more than 250 gardens in 15 states, plus 32 different Digging Deeper programs. Comprehensive garden descriptions, dates, times, directions, and other details are all included in the 2020 edition of the Open Days Directory, which is printed in the spring. All this information and any late-breaking additions or other changes can be viewed on gardenconservancy.org/open-days.