Tucked behind quiet streets in Georgetown, the gardens at Dumbarton Oaks are one of Washington’s loveliest surprises: a series of outdoor rooms that unfold downhill in terraces, each one greener and more peaceful than the last.
The story begins in 1920, when Robert and Mildred Bliss bought the estate. A year later Mildred Bliss began working with landscape architect Beatrix Farrand, and together, over more than three decades, they shaped about ten acres of formal gardens above a naturalistic park. In 1940 the Blisses gave Dumbarton Oaks to Harvard University, which cares for the house, museum and gardens today.
Visitors wander from the Orangery and the Fountain Terrace to the famous Pebble Garden, pictured here, where a swirling mosaic of stones spreads beneath a canopy of trees. There is a Rose Garden planted by color, an Ellipse ringed with hornbeams, kitchen gardens, orchards and Cherry Hill, which puts on a soft pink show each spring. In autumn the terraces turn gold, and the whole place feels like a secret kept in the middle of the city.
The gardens are open in the regular season, March 1 to October 31, from 2:00 to 6:00 p.m., Tuesday through Sunday, except federal holidays, and garden tickets are sold online, not on site, according to Dumbarton Oaks. The museum, with its Byzantine and Pre-Columbian collections, is free. For a calm, beautiful afternoon in Washington, Happy City News readers, this Georgetown garden is hard to beat.
Photo: DC Gardens, CC BY 2.0, via Wikimedia Commons
