Yew Dell Botanical Gardens

Plants & Gardens

The Gardens at Yew Dell

The gardens at Yew Dell offer a delightful place to spend a day, an excellent place to learn new plants and provide an opportunity to check out design details for your own garden. The gardens range from formal to informal, and contain everything from trees to shrubs, annuals and perennials and everything else you can imagine. And while variety is the consistent theme, the one thing you can always count on is that there is always something blooming at Yew Dell - 12 months of the year. Check out our seasonal bloom chart if you don't believe us!

Arboretum

This is a delightful place for a quiet walk among one of the best tree and shrub collections in the region. Extensive collections of Cornus (dogwoods), Fagus (beech), Magnolia, Viburnum, Ilex (holly) and more offer a year round display. Many specimens are mature specimens of some varieties that are just coming onto the market so you can see for yourself what they’ll look like in the future. From spring flowers to summer foliage, fall foliage and fruit and winter bark and form, there is always something beautiful to see in the Arboretum.

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Big Pine Garden

This shady garden offers a wide range of unusual plants from all over the world. From North American native buckeyes to Chinese delphiniums, the garden includes many selections not yet available on the market. The large Pinus strobus (white pine) that gives the garden its name, is one of the few plants on the grounds that was here when Theodore and Martha Lee Klein bought the property in the early 1940s.

Dry Stream Garden

This new garden is slated for complete redevelopment in the next year. The design was developed in collaboration with our friends at Environs, Inc. and with support from the Oldham County Environmental Authority as an exhibit on how a garden can be combined with effective handling of surface storm-water. The garden is designed to absorb much of the initial rainfall and drainage, to slow the runoff, and ultimately to greatly reduce erosion and silting of streams and ponds downstream.

Greenhouse Terrace

This soon-to-be-new-garden, will grace the space between the planned greenhouse range and the entrance to the Gheens Barn. Stay tuned for future announcements about this exciting project.

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Overlook Gardens

A new garden designed and planted in 2005, the Overlook combines old stand-by reliable plants and new varieties not yet on the market. It is an excellent place to learn perennials, especially those that love hot dry locations. The garden sits on very shallow soil and is rarely irrigated so you can see first-hand, how plants perform in this tough setting. The Overlook Garden was designed by noted British plantsman and designer Adrian Bloom. It was planted entirely by volunteers with more than 3000 plants donated from the 4 corners of the Country . . . all in a single day!

Secret Garden

Flanked by Yew Dell's Holly Allee, the Secret Garden has had a long history as a place for display and testing of everything from dwarf conifers to peonies. Through the hard work and generosity of the Louisville Rambler Garden Club and support from the Principal Financial Group, this garden has experienced a rebirth as a display of more than 70 winter/spring-blooming Helleborus species and varieties (lenten rose), cold hardy camellias (fall and winter blooming) over 100 hardy ferns and numerous species and cultivars of Asarum (hardy gingers). Other companion plants in the garden include a sampling of hostas, the white-leafed Liriope 'Okina' and the majestic Cardiocrinum giganteum with massive white lily-like summer flowers held some 8-9 feet above the ground.

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Serpentine Garden

This stunning evergreen garden, located on the north end of Yew Dell’s historic core, is one of the property’s signature plantings. The garden is composed of an impressive collection of evergreens including species of Abies (fir), Picea (spruce), Pinus (pine), Taxus (yew) and Tsuga (hemlock). The collection is a stunning display of colors, textures and forms, all tied together by a ribbon of Taxus. This garden will be going through a gradual rehabilitation that will involve removal of some of the older, overgrown plants, to be replaced by new specimens.

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Sunken Garden

One of the oldest gardens on the grounds, the Sunken Garden has seen life as a dwarf conifer garden, rose garden, and cut flower garden. It was rehabilitated between 2002 and 2005 through the efforts of the Oldham County Master Gardeners and Green Thumbs Garden Club. The garden contains plants designed to give the feel of an alpine environment and includes plants from such widely spread climes as the Himalayan Mountains, deserts of southwestern North America and Central America and about everything in between. In order to give some of these plants a fighting chance in a Kentucky climate, most of the soil in the garden was removed and replaced with granite grit and coarse sand to provide excellent drainage – drainage that is essential, especially for the cold-hardy succulents from the Southwest.

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Nurseries

Yew Dell’s nurseries provide the space we need to propagate and grow all the plants for our garden projects, research studies, plant sales and training workshops. The nurseries contain plants collected from all across Kentucky and all around the globe so you’ll likely see plants you’ve never seen before. You may also notice that most plants are not labeled as they are in the display gardens. Visitors are welcome to wander the areas but we ask you to pay close attention to signs and to avoid walking in restricted areas. Some of our research projects are quite sensitive and we ask you to respect the postings. If you have questions about any of our work, by all means feel free to ask one of our staff. We always love to talk about our projects!

Vegetable Gardens

There are two veggie gardens at Yew Dell; one you can visit and another that will be a couple of years in the making. The current vegetable and herb garden is located on the Castle Terrace, south of the main house (administrative offices). In this garden visitors will see heirloom tomatoes, cold hardy bananas and a wide range of other interesting plants. The large tree in the back corner of the space is a specimen of the famed Davidia involucrata (Dove Tree), a species originally collected in China and introduced to cultivation by none other than Ernest “Chinese” Wilson. When in bloom, it is a magnificent sight indeed!
The second veggie garden is being designed and will be constructed over the next few years. It sits on the site of Klein’s former formal/topiary gardens. Plans include inclusion of one or two topiaries (as a nod to Klein’s inspirations in the garden), espaliered dwarf fruit trees, extensive herb and vegetable plantings, and across the drive, a small fruit nursery.

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Walled Garden

Located adjacent to the main house (administrative offices), Yew Dell's walled garden was rehabilitated with generous support from the Glenview Garden Club. This traditional English walled garden is surrounded on three sides by one of Klein's signature fieldstone walls set off with a small round pool in the center of the garden space. The changing pallet of mostly herbaceous perennials includes blooms throughout the gardening season. Featured plants include Hakonechloa macra 'All Gold' (Japanese Forest Grass), Chinese tree peonies (Paeonia suffructicosa and cultivars) and the dwarf yellow-leafed oakleaf hydrangea, H. quercifolia 'Little Honey'.

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