Bamboo Brook Outdoor Education Center, Botanical garden in Chester Township, New Jersey.
Bamboo Brook Outdoor Education Center is a 100-acre property featuring formal gardens, pools, and walking paths arranged around a Colonial Revival house built in 1912. The spaces work together to create a cohesive landscape where vegetation, water features, and architecture form an integrated design.
Martha Brookes Hutcheson, a pioneering female landscape architect, designed this property starting in 1911 and lived here until 1959 when it was called Merchiston Farm. Her work on these grounds reflected her influence during a period when women were beginning to make their mark in landscape design.
The garden blends Italian Renaissance design with native plants like dogwood, lilac, and elderberry that flourish throughout the seasons. You can experience how these formal planting choices shape the way the grounds look and feel as you walk through different sections.
The center welcomes visitors from sunrise to sunset and offers self-guided tours through a seasonal phone program that requires no tickets or reservations. Wear comfortable shoes and allow plenty of time to explore the different garden areas at your own pace without feeling rushed.
An advanced rainwater collection system made of swales, concrete curbs, cisterns, and catch basins supplies water throughout the property to the house, pools, and gardens. This hidden infrastructure reveals how water management and sustainable practices were built into the landscape design decades before these ideas became common.
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