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  • The Most Beautiful Botanical Gardens in the US

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    Known for their stunning plant collections, captivating displays, and awe-inspiring exhibitions, America’s botanical gardens offer some of the most beautiful sights in the country. These gardens are dynamic destinations where garden and nature lovers and families can connect with nature.

    Whether it’s the sweet aroma of blooming roses or the impressive sight of towering palm trees, botanical gardens are visually stunning and rich educational resources.

    Here are 17 of the most beautiful botanical gardens in the United States, perfect for a family visit this spring.

    New York Botanical Garden, Bronx, NY

    A short subway ride from Manhattan takes you to the New York Botanical Garden. Spanning 250 acres, this garden boasts an impressive collection of over one million plants, featuring 650 rose varieties. The garden serves as a hub for special events, art exhibits, and educational programs that cater to both adults and children.

    San Francisco Botanical Garden, California

    Situated in Golden Gate State Park, this garden is home to nearly 9,000 plant species from around the world. The garden’s design mimics various global environments, offering visitors a diverse botanical experience.

    Brooklyn Botanical Garden, Brooklyn, NY

    Opened in 1911, the Brooklyn Botanical Garden is a staple in New York. Covering 52 acres, this garden boasts a unique collection of plant species. More than 200+ cherry blossom trees bloom each spring, transforming the garden into a vibrant tapestry of colors. The garden offers a unique experience, featuring live jazz performances and other attractions, to attract visitors from around the country.

    Atlanta Botanical Garden, Atlanta, GA

    Opened in 1976, the Atlanta Botanical Garden is located in the heart of Midtown Atlanta. This 30-acre garden features “an award-winning Children’s Garden, the serene Storza Woods highlighted by a unique Canopy Walk, and the picturesque Skyline Garden.” This urban oasis is worth a visit.

    Desert Botanical Garden, Phoenix

    Nestled among the Papago Buttes, the Desert Botanical Garden in Phoenix is a 140-acre expanse that showcases a vast collection of cacti, succulents, and desert flora from around the globe. Since its inception in 1939, this garden has attracted approximately 400,000 visitors annually, offering a unique blend of natural beauty and educational opportunities within its scenic desert landscape.

    Hawaii Tropical Botanical Garden, Big Island

    This non-profit garden spans over 100 acres on Hawaii’s Big Island and features more than 2,500 species of plants, including a variety of heliconias and bromeliads. Visitors can explore lush vegetation alongside streams and waterfalls, making it an ideal spot for education and nature walks enriched by guided tours and extensive plant information resources.

    Chicago Botanical Garden, Illinois

    As the most frequented public garden in the U.S., the Chicago Botanic Garden spans over 385 acres and features 26 distinct gardens representing various habitats. This garden attracts over a million visitors annually, focusing on the conservation of rare plant species while offering multiple academic programs.

    Fort Worth Botanic Garden, Texas

    Located in the heart of Fort Worth, this 110-acre garden is the oldest in Texas and features over 2,500 species of plants. It’s known for its Japanese-style rose garden, waterfalls, and a 10,000-square-foot rainforest conservatory, making it a must-visit for family outings.

    Missouri Botanical Garden, St. Louis

    Founded in 1859 by Henry Shaw, this 79-acre site is the oldest botanical garden in North America. It features a herbarium with over 6.6 million specimens and a Japanese-style garden. The garden also hosts a summer Green Living music festival with a geodesic dome and a historic brick conservatory from 1882.

    International Rose Test Garden, Oregon

    Located in Portland, this garden is the oldest public rose test garden in the U.S., featuring 10,000 rose bushes across 600 varieties. It’s a paradise for rose enthusiasts and a beautiful spot for summer visits.

    United States Botanic Garden, Washington D.C.

    Established by Congress in 1820, this historic garden near the US Capitol is one of the oldest in America. It contains over 65,000 plants, including ancient ferns, and features themed garden rooms and public displays in a compact yet diverse setting.

    Fairchild Tropical Botanic Garden, Florida

    Near Miami, Fairchild covers 83 acres and is both a lush botanical garden and a hub for conservation research. It features a butterfly conservatory and a vast collection of tropical fruit plants, making it a comprehensive venue for both leisure and learning.

    Huntington Library Art Museum and Botanical Garden, California

    This expansive site in San Marino offers 16 themed gardens and an extensive collection of art and library resources. It’s famous for its Japanese garden and the Garden of Flowering Fragrance, providing a serene escape filled with cultural and botanical treasures.

    Longwood Gardens, Pennsylvania

    Longwood Gardens spans 1,075 acres and features spectacular shows like the Orchid Extravaganza. It’s known for its diverse plant collections and seasonal light shows, offering something for everyone.

    Filoli Botanical Garden, California

    Filoli is located in the Santa Cruz Mountains and features 16 acres of formal gardens within a 654-acre estate. It’s known for its spring bulb displays, fruit trees, and elegant water features.

    Dallas Arboretum and Botanical Gardens, Texas

    This 66-acre garden in Dallas hosts the largest outdoor flower festival in the Southwest, known as Dallas Blooms. The garden offers numerous amenities, including a children’s area and thematic gardens exploring different botanical experiences.

    ABQ BioPark Botanic Garden, New Mexico

    Located in Albuquerque, the ABQ BioPark Botanic Garden has 36 acres of gardens. It features several rare and exotic plants from the Southwest and around the world.

    Visitors to the garden can enjoy various public displays, including the Sasebo Japanese Garden, the Children’s Fantasy Garden, the Butterfly Pavilion, and the BUGarium, one of the largest arthropod displays in the United States. ABQ BioPark is also home to a zoo, an aquarium, and Tin

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  • Thanksgiving’s Most Underrated Food

    Thanksgiving’s Most Underrated Food

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    Since the start of 2022, I’ve consumed more than my body weight in sweet potatoes. The average American eats closer to the equivalent of one (1) fry a day, but for the past decade, I’ve had at least half a pound of the roots at almost every dinner. I travel with sweet potatoes more reliably than I travel with my spouse. All I need in order to chow down is a microwave and something to cushion my hands against the heat.

    Tomorrow, Americans will finally put sweet potatoes in the spotlight—and still not appreciate all that they’re worth. Families across the country will smother the roots with sugar and butter beneath a crunchy marshmallow crust. This classic casserole may be the only serving of sweet potatoes some people have all year—which is a travesty in terms of both quantity and (sorry) preparation style. Sweet potatoes deserve so much more than what Thanksgiving serves them. And maybe they’d get it, if they weren’t so misunderstood.

    For starters, sweet potatoes are not potatoes or yams. Each belongs to a distinct family of plants. And although potatoes and yams are technically tubers, a riff on a plant stem, sweet potatoes are a modified root. The common name doesn’t exactly help, which is why many experts want to change it from sweet potato to … sweetpotato. Even in grocery stores, confusion abounds. A small part of Lauren Eserman-Campbell, a geneticist and sweet-potato expert at the Atlanta Botanical Garden, dies every time she spots a can of Bruce’s Yams.

    Mostly, the sweet potatoes in American markets resemble Bruce’s (Not) Yams: orange-fleshed, brown-skinned, sugary, moist. But the plant’s true range is much more diverse. The outside comes in earthy umbers, ruddy reds and purples, and sandy beiges; the interior can be cream, buttercup yellow, cantaloupe, lilac, even a shade of violet that verges on black. Some are rather watery; others are almost as dry and starchy as bread. Not all of them are even perceptibly sweet. And thanks to the plant’s zany genetics—six copies of each of 15 chromosomes—nearly every combo of color, texture, taste, shape, and sugar and water content can spring out of a cross between, say, a dryish, veiny purple and a moist, smooth-skinned orange. Craig Yencho, a sweet-potato breeder and geneticist at North Carolina State University, told me that, given enough time, “I could find a sweet potato that would be enjoyable to just about any consumer.”

    The common misconception that potatoes are fattening and devoid of nutrition (slander!) might make some people assume the same or worse of sweet potatoes. But that couldn’t be further from the truth. Pit their nutritional profile against other staple crops, such as rice, wheat, and corn—all of which command a larger share of the world market—and, in many respects, “sweet potato is on top,” says Samuel Acheampong, a geneticist at the University of Cape Coast, in Ghana. The orange-fleshed varieties, in particular, come chock-full of iron, zinc, and beta-carotene, a precursor to vitamin A; the purples are rich in cancer-fighting anthocyanins. Even sweet-potato leaves are a powerhouse, packed with folate and a surprising amount of protein. Also, they’re delicious stir-fried.

    Read: America’s lost story of crops rewrites the history of farming

    Sweet potatoes tend to get America’s attention only in November, but they’re hardy, flexible, and ubiquitous enough to be an anytime, anywhere kind of food. They’ve taken root on every continent, save for Antarctica; they’ve been rocketed into space. Acre for acre, sweet potatoes also yield edible crop far more efficiently than many other plants do, “and that is really important in families where they don’t have enough quality food,” says Robert Mwanga, a sweet-potato geneticist based in Uganda, where some locals eat the roots at nearly every meal. In Kenya, sweet potatoes have sustained communities when other crops have failed. Among some populations, the roots have earned an apt moniker: cilera abana, protector of the children.

    But even among scientists, sweet potatoes get, if not a bad rap, at least an underwhelming one. “It’s a tiny community, and there’s not a lot of funding,” Eserman-Campbell told me. “I went to a sweet-potato breeders’ meeting one time, and I just thought there would be more people there.” It doesn’t help that the plants can be a bit of a genetic pain, Mwanga told me. Their many copied chromosomes make breeding tricky, and new sweet-potato varieties can be propagated only by clonal cuttings. Among consumers, the sweet potato has also struggled to shed its reputation as a poor person’s food, turned to in times of famine or war and culturally linked to rural, low-income farmers.

    People in the Western world are catching on—especially now that nutritionists so often tout sweet potatoes as a superfood, says Ana Rita Simões, a taxonomist at Kew Gardens, in London. In the past decade, demand for Yencho’s sweet potatoes has tripled, maybe quintupled; “I have never seen a crop take off like that,” he said.

    Read: The correct time to eat Thanksgiving dinner

    Culinarily, though, Americans are still batting in the sweet potato’s minor leagues. The big hitter remains the Thanksgiving casserole—a dish Acheampong likes but remains a bit mystified by. “You guys add a lot of sugar,” he told me, which is amusing, considering that the orange-fleshed varieties are already plenty sweet. Plus, the casserole is (gasp) under the thumb of Big Confection: Its invention was commissioned as part of a ploy to sell more marshmallows. It’s sugar all the way down.

    I am not here to yuck anyone’s yam; I celebrate any dish that features sweet potatoes. More preferable, though, would be casting these wonderful roots in a starring role. In other parts of the world, sweet-potato recipes run the gamut from sugary to savory, from appetizer to main to dessert. They’re pureed, stir-fried, noodle-fied; they’re blended into soups, beverages, and pastries. They’ve even found their way into booze. Imagine how they could dress our Thanksgiving tables: sweet potatoes roasted; sweet potatoes grilled; sweet potatofurkey—I mean, why the heck not.

    Read: How to engineer the optimally delicious Thanksgiving plate

    Or perhaps there is a more modest proposal to be made: Enjoy the roots all on their own. Yencho, like me, is a purist; he likes his sweet potatoes plain, baked until soft, no condiments necessary. They just don’t need anything else.

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    Katherine J. Wu

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