Mendocino Coast Botanical Gardens
If you’ve seen one botanical garden, you’ve seen them all, right? Nope! We’ve visited a lot of gardens and this one is by far our favorite so far. Everywhere you look, there’s bright pops of color, interestingly shaped leaves, and trees with big sweeping branches. This is no ordinary garden.
The Mendocino Coast Botanical Gardens is composed of 47 acres and will take about 2 hours to explore. The mild climate makes it a garden for all seasons with manicured gardens, a dense coastal pine forest, fern-covered canyons, rhododendrons, dahlias, begonias, magnolias, conifers, heathers, and more.
They are open every day except Thanksgiving Day and Christmas Day, 10am to 4pm or 5pm – depending on the time of year.
There’s a garden store, Rhody’s Garden Café, nursery, and they even have workshops and events throughout the year like yoga, birdwatching walks, mosaics workshops, journaling classes, and even a festival of lights during the end of November and all throughout December.
The garden is broken up into different areas like the perennial garden, rose garden, mediterranean garden, magnolia collection, and so one. There’s so much to see here, but I’ll show you a few of those areas during our visit.
Succulent Garden
The majority of the plants in the succulent garden are from highland Mexico and South Africa; regions that have climates that are more like Mendocino’s in terms of rainfall and temperatures. While there are over 150 different species and cultivars planted in the Succulent Garden, the collection represents only a tiny portion of the vast and wonderful world of succulents.
The crown jewel right now is the Agave plant which is in its death bloom. The flower stalk is about 20 feet tall, rising roughly 15 feet above foliage with a whopping 44-foot circumference.
Dahlia Garden
Dahlias were one of the first flowers that Gardens' founder Ernest Schoefer planted. The Dahlia Garden is one of the most favored locations at Mendocino Coast Botanical Gardens and was definitely ours.
The gardens' collection of dahlias consists of more than 625 individual plants representing 150 varieties. The blooms of mid- to late-summer provide a stunning subject for artists and a glorious backdrop for weddings. It truly is jaw-droppingly gorgeous in person.
Vegetable Garden & Orchard
This five-acre garden has a mix of annual and perennial vegetables, medicinal herbs, edible herbs, plants used for dyeing fibers and fabrics, fruit trees, and flowering plants that attract beneficial insects. The mild Mendocino climate enables the vegetables to grow and be harvested suitable year-round. Each week, garden staff and volunteers harvest the garden's bounty and deliver it to the Fort Bragg Food Bank.
Check out these other activities here in Mendocino that you might enjoy:
