Permission to Wander
Clear your mind on endless trails.
Hiking through Lebanon Hills Regional Park, the massive Dakota County park that stretches between Eagan and Apple Valley, can feel like an elaborate game of choose-your-own-adventure. At the adorable visitor center, with its hobbit-y moss-covered roof, you can pick up any one of several different recommended hiking maps—the Discovery Trail, the Voyageur Trail, the Jensen Lake Trail—and use the corresponding numbered wooden posts out in the field to put together whatever kind of loop you’re up for—1 mile, 2 miles, 10 miles.
The endless permutations seem designed for the wanderer, or the saunterer, as Henry David Thoreau defined it: the type of person, as he wrote in his 1851 essay “Walking,” “who had a genius…for sauntering, which word is beautifully derived ‘from idle people who roved about the country, in the Middle Ages…under pretense of going à la Sainte Terre,’ to the Holy Land.” According to Thoreau, back then the children would spy someone sauntering by and exclaim, “‘There goes a Sainte-Terrer,’ a Saunterer, a Holy-Lander.”
Lebanon Hills is truly a saunterer’s holy land. At 2,000 total acres, it’s the largest park in the Dakota County park system, containing the mileage to support an unlimited buffet of hikes. And it’s sort of a self-contained Minnesota in miniature, with miles and miles of trails sluicing through its gentle Minnesota River Valley hills, pocked throughout by 13 lakes and 58 ponds of various sizes, with several of our various ecoregions represented: oak savanna, bluestem prairie, coniferous wetland. There are Boundary Waters–style portages for canoes; slaloms for mountain bikes; big, wide trails for horses; and in the winter, they’ll groom miles of cross-country ski trails. But for most visitors, for most of the year, walking is the sacred activity.
It’s become a favorite spot to grab a map, find a trailhead, and wander in the woods until I can disconnect my brain from my feet. And as I saunter along, I’ve been able to consider my long, strange relationship with using my two legs for transportation, meditation, and exercise.
Over the years, I’ve cycled through several of my own walking eras. I grew up 25 miles north of Lebanon Hills, in White Bear Lake, a classic American suburb, one of those places where even if walking were encouraged by the local infrastructure, you didn’t really need to do it. We had cars to get us from point A to point Maplewood Mall, right? But I was a Boy Scout as a kid and became a Y Camp expedition-style hiker later in my adolescence, so I grew to love the sort of walking I like to do down in Lebanon Hills—aimlessly accompanying my poodle, Blair, on the 2-mile-long Jensen Lake Trail loop, for instance, hugging the shore of the lake on the half-boardwalk, half-dirt path. Taking inventory of the changing colors of the trees and water lilies, I’m able to think about hiking as sort of the ultimate therapeutic recreational act—walking seems to be the natural pace at which to experience nature and quiet your mind, you know?
And on my way around Lebanon Hills, Blair and I will pause occasionally, and I’ll snap a picture, as if the landscape is posing as it ascends and descends, lakes or ponds suddenly artfully framed by the trees. These mini revelations make me think about how I’ve come to use walking as a sort of professional tool over time. When I first started earning a living as a writer, I came to rely on Aristotle’s classic peripatetic technique—peri- being the Greek root for “around” and -patetic, from their pateo, meaning “to walk.” Whether I was blocked on a story or not, it always seemed to help. There’s something that happens when your body is occupied by the proprioception necessary to put one foot in front of another over uneven terrain—this sort of physically involuntary concentration frees your mind to wander off on its own. Your imagination comes untethered from your body, and ideas become sentences, and then paragraphs, and eventually complete(ish) stories. This kind of walking is nearly pure—walking for walking’s sake—but you’re still aspiring for a result, if not a destination.
Other times, as I’ve wandered, I’ve considered how the point of my ambulation has changed in the 10 years since I bought my poodle. Blair needs twice-daily walks to do his business—he refuses to do it in his own yard—so I’ve been committed to a poodle’s schedule for the last decade. Which is a different sort of walking—you’re walking for the poodle, not for yourself. (Here’s a philosophical inquiry for the Ancient Greeks: So, is the poodle actually walking you?)
And then there was my COVID era of walking—in the two years before I had a kid, when I was constantly walking for exercise. That sort of walking became an almost obsessive-compulsive activity—probably because I had gamified it with an iPhone app, measuring each day by my success or failure in hitting 10,000 steps.
Finally, my son was born, and from the jump, I would take the boy on walks, either strapped to my chest in a BabyBjörn or pushed along in a stroller. Those walks through my neighborhood in Northeast Minneapolis make up the fondest memories of my life. But then my baby became a toddler, and walking became chasing, and my knee started bothering me, and my desire to walk diminished. After a while, my wife started walking Blair around more and more often—and you didn’t have to be Aristotle to realize she was also doing it to find a small reprieve from the toddler, and from me.
But then came this assignment, and with the help of a cortisone shot for my knee and a new commitment to lifting weights, I found my passion for walking again, out here in Lebanon Hills. I’ve gone on walks by myself out here, and walks with the poodle, and walks with the entire family. I’ve figured out my favorite landmarks on which to direct my looping—the boardwalk around Jensen Lake, the A-frame shelter back by Portage Lake, the stand of big white pines by Marsh Lake—but at my best, I’m just a saunterer, idly wandering about, enjoying the holy land. 860 Cliff Rd., Eagan —Steve Marsh
“Over the years, I’ve cycled through several of my own walking eras.”
Inside Take
With land acquisition that began in 1967—starting with 80 acres around Jensen Lake—Lebanon Hills is Dakota County’s oldest park. And as nearby cities like Apple Valley and Eagan have developed, Lebanon Hills has grown apace: At nearly 2,000 acres, it’s now the largest park in the Dakota County system as well, attracting more than 500,000 visitors each year to the contoured trails around its many lakes and wetlands.
Set within the Minnesota River Valley’s glacial moraine, created when glaciers moved through and pushed up hills of varying size around all those lakes, the land was primarily farmland before it was gradually acquired by the county and became parkland. Dakota County has continued to invest in the area, both protecting and gradually reclaiming much of the land’s wooded biodiversity while adding opportunities for year-round recreation.
The crown jewel of the 20-mile trail system is the Voyageur Trek. Split between a northern and a southern route, it’s a full 5.3-mile loop that takes a hiker through a quaking aspen grove, oak savanna, wildflower prairie, and a shallow and deep marsh. There are placards along the entire route that keep you on point while also giving you the option to break off the loop into almost infinite permutations. Along the way, you’ll walk on boardwalks along the water’s edge, over adorable little bridges, and up hills that will plateau into gorgeous lookouts over the various lakes.
There are also shorter, but no less beautiful, hikes available. Notably: the half mile to-and-from hike to Lebanon Hills’ elegant, almost churchlike A-frame picnic shelter that looks out over Portage Lake. There are a few picnic tables under its roof (30-person capacity), and it has all the modern conveniences—like the nearby fire ring and a porta potty. My pro move: Stop for birria burritos at El Sazon, the legendary taco joint found in the back of the BP gas station in Eagan, to pack in and enjoy at this little respite on Portage Lake. —Steve Marsh
Boughs, Birds & Bogs
Explore a land of local treasures.
Where do you live? It’s hard to say, really, if everywhere you look you see big-box-store hydrangeas (native to Japan), hostas (China), and azaleas (none native to Minnesota), all clumped around the edges of low green carpets of Kentucky bluegrass (probably European, actually). If you want to know where you really live—if you want to feel it in your bones, smell it, see it, hear it—do this: Get to the Eloise Butler Wildflower Garden and Bird Sanctuary, fast.
If you’ve never been, here’s the skinny: The year was 1907, during the vigorous and world-changing dawn of American conservation. Theodore Roosevelt was in the White House protecting national forests and parks, a farsighted, consequential reaction to the preceding era of unimaginable North American clear-cutting and environmental devastation, where trees were considered free home heating, passenger pigeons were free dinner (and declared extinct in 1914), and white-tailed deer were so over-hunted in a deforested world that they were nearly extirpated from (extinct within) Minnesota. Try to imagine that world!
Into that moment stepped the visionary Eloise Butler, a Minnesota conservation hero, who thought, Where we live must be saved; where we live, in all its detail and specificity, must be appreciated. She set to filling a parcel of land, which included a tamarack bog, with the whole diversity of Minnesota plant life—our own, rooted-here Noah’s Ark of local vegetative life.
She dug up lady’s slipper orchids and transplanted them in what has become one of the state’s most vigorous stands. She planted local eastern hemlock trees (big pine-looking trees that are now endangered in the wild) so that we now have one of the few surviving mature hemlock groves in the world. She planted a whole prairie of towering prairie dock and sticky royal catchfly. Now, 120-ish years later, the garden named in her honor is a tiny conservation miracle just outside of the heart of downtown.
Go. Go for one of the free guided nature walks that happen every morning, so you can ask: What’s that? What are those? The answer might be: “That’s an indigo bunting, blue as a cartoon parrot, darting around the great white oak on the hill.” Or: “Those are the swarms of warblers, who come through at four o’clock in the afternoon during the autumn migration to eat the acres of local wild berries and seeds.” Or: “That might be the rarest bee we have, the rusty patched bumblebee, often seen here on a wild aster or clinging to wild bergamot in one of its last redoubts.”
In 1914, Eloise Butler wrote to Theodore Wirth, the superintendent of our Minneapolis parks system: “Within a space of twenty acres may be seen in an hour what would be impossible to find in traversing the state for several days.” When a master gardener is right, they’re right—it’s astonishing.
Walk the few looping paths inside the high-gated garden, which locks at six o’clock at night (and for the winter around Halloween), and you can see deepest Northwoods wildflowers on the Trillium Trail, western prairie blooms on Aster Aisle and along Blazing Star Boulevard, and all the stars of our rainy wetlands above the spring-fed creek spanned by a boardwalk path known as Lady’s-Slipper Lane. You really would have to build a year to see all these microclimates otherwise, zipping up to the North Shore for the woodland ephemerals, then zipping down to Bluestem Prairie Scientific and Natural Area to see the tall bluestem prairie, while you can see them all in a morning at Eloise Butler.
Or maybe in an hour, if you’re hiking fast. (Trail running, however, is forbidden; there are a lot of little kids and tight turns.) The only bad word you can say about Eloise Butler is that to experience it is to yearn for more, as you can traipse every trail without racking up a brag-worthy amount of steps. For more, why not head straight from Eloise Butler to the Quaking Bog down the hill and across the road to rack up one more classic, fragile, beautiful Minnesota ecosystem?
A core sample taken of the bog in 1995 revealed that the acidic, undecayed sphagnum moss beneath is 3,700 years old and more than 20 feet deep. On top of the bog lies a boardwalk so you don’t sink in, a perfect walk to see pitcher plants and sundews, those rare northern carnivorous plants, in spring and summer, and tamaracks year-round. The tamarack, of course, is Minnesota’s native conifer that thrives in swamps and bogs and has needles that start spring as dark red buds that become the palest frog green, turn a fluffy deep green for summer, then briefly turn as yellow-gold as a school pencil in autumn before dropping in winter, leaving the tree bare. It’s worth your time to take a spin through the tamaracks every few days in early October, because one day they’ll likely look like they were never trees at all but have always instead been wonders spun from golden yarn or bright yellow glass.
A golden tree, which is breathtaking, exquisite, magnificent—of course. But also potentially life changing?
Walk for a few hours at Eloise Butler and journey through the Quaking Bog; you feel in your bones that here is something very specific, as special and unique as a Costa Rican cloud forest or a rain shadow desert like Joshua Tree—it’s Minnesota! Land of tamarack, home of the lady’s slipper, territory of the indigo bunting—Minnesota! A spot packed with as many marvels as any art museum. Thank you, Eloise Butler, both human and gated city garden, for making where we really live come alive before our eyes, vividly, thrillingly. 1 Theodore Wirth Pkwy., Mpls. —Dara Moskowitz Grumdahl
Take a Stroll Along the Avenue
What’s the difference between architecture and sculpture? For Plato, architecture was superior, because unlike sculpture, it’s not deceptive; it doesn’t pretend to be something it isn’t. And yet, all down Summit Avenue, columns topped with fancy scrollwork that would be recognizable to any ancient Greek temple-goer in 800 B.C.E., stone carved as intricately as lace, stained glass as full of narrative and detail as a painting—is this architecture pretending to be something it isn’t? Is it greater than sculpture because it’s functional, or is it less than sculpture for the same reason?
Of course, there are no right answers, but discussing architecture is as human as child-rearing: We’ve been doing it forever. And it’s a conversation best had when the real world is in view, like along the historic architectural miracle that is old St. Paul.
The 4-and-a-half-mile run down Summit from the Cathedral to the Mississippi offers America’s longest-standing collection of Victorian homes. Of the original 440, a whopping 373 have survived fire and the wrecking ball. Add in a few of the other grand streets, like Heather Place, Grand Hill, Laurel Avenue, and Lincoln Avenue, and you’re looking at a living art museum of some of the most beautiful domestic architecture ever built in America.
While the area comprises hundreds of homes, it’s also the easiest of all neighborhoods in which to do a self-guided walking tour. You can tap a few books to aid you, notably Larry Millett’s definitive 2009 book AIA Guide to St. Paul’s Summit Avenue and Hill District, as well as Millett’s luxe 2014 coffee-table book Minnesota’s Own: Preserving Our Grand Homes, which offers rare peeks inside treasures like the Goodkind Double House. That said, probably the most fun you can have is to stroll Summit with someone interesting, gaze at all the lovely homes, and engage in a game we’ll call: Walk & Talk!
- Would you rather live on Summit Hill, where the wind roars but the views are spectacular, or on Summit Avenue, which has less wind and more people-watching?
- Stone house or wood house—what’s your favorite?
- Covered porch, wraparound porch, open porch—which is the best?
- Clarence H. Johnston Sr., onetime state architect, designed numerous Minnesota buildings, including Glensheen Mansion, Northrop Auditorium, the Stillwater prison, and the F. Scott Fitzgerald house at 599 Summit, as well as other Summit homes at 260, 476, 490, 587–601, 629, 701, 705, 807, and 955. Should he be better known?
- Cass Gilbert, one of America’s greatest architects, is the fellow behind our own state capitol, the U.S. Supreme Court, and Summit Avenue gems at 312, 318, and 339 Summit. Got a favorite?
- Pick your ideal Summit Avenue season: crimson and gold fall leaves; deep winter snows with icicles on the eaves; spring tulips, crocuses, and lilacs; or summer hollyhocks, foxgloves, roses, and lilies?
- How many surviving carriageways can you spot? How many have the surviving carriage houses, too?
- W. A. Frost, the bar half, was F. Scott Fitzgerald and Zelda’s drugstore and soda fountain. The Commodore Bar, the exquisite, teeny-tiny Art Deco bar in St. Paul (also once a Fitzgerald happy place—the couple lived upstairs) is getting ready to open to the public again. Ever been?
Finally, in pondering the difference between architecture and sculpture, also consider: What’s the difference between a sculpture park and Summit Avenue in St. Paul? —Dara Moskowitz Grumdahl
Island in Time
Journey along a pathway surrounded by hardwoods and a long history.
As I stood on the Pike Island beachhead with my wife, Maggie, our little boy, and our poodle, we all watched the waters of the Mississippi and Minnesota Rivers flowing together just as the sun was beginning to set behind our backs. There was barely any sign of the powerful currents coming into confluence beneath the gray water’s sun-dappled surface, but looking at the limestone bluffs in the distance, bluffs that have been carved by these currents over millennia, a warm golden light gradually illuminated the entire eastern bank.
Standing there, I couldn’t help but grok all the steps that had led us here—not just mine and Maggie’s, as we took turns pushing our son’s stroller on the dirt path that cut through the floodplain hardwood forest flecked with yellow and orange—but the steps that reached back to Minnesota’s territorial days and beyond, steps going back thousands of years, to when the Dakota began calling this place Bdote, their word for two rivers becoming one.
Looking out on Bdote on this warm fall evening, from the tip of the island the Dakota call Wita Tanka, translated as Big Island, the thought of our collective steps overwhelmed me—how could it have taken me my entire life to get down here? It was no longer a place I had read about. And even if I had ignored the large annotated map that greeted us in the parking lot a couple miles back, in both English and Dakota, or if I’d never looked up “Bdote” on Wikipedia before arriving, or if I’d skipped the first chapters of all the history books I’ve ever read on the state of Minnesota, I still think that I would’ve felt the spirit of the ancient—the palpable sensation that I was just the latest in a long lineage of human beings who came here to watch the golden light enrobe this landscape.
I do believe that knowing our complete history, both the light and the dark, made my peripatetic conversion experience, taking me from the purely intellectual into the physical and actual, more profound. Seeing the rivers come together in person, I could better understand why the Dakota consider this place the holiest of holies: To them, it’s not only the center of the world but the place where life itself commenced, where their cosmic gods formed the first people out of the mud and gave them breath. And that’s why “bdote” is the same word the Dakota use for a baby’s first cry.
I could also more fully understand why the American military built a fort here on top of these banks: Until the train and the automobile, these two rivers were the largest thoroughfares for hundreds of miles in any direction, and thus a crucial strategic coordinate to attain, which they did when then-lieutenant Zebulon Pike acquired it and the surrounding 100,000 acres from the Dakota in a treaty signed in 1805. Pike promised $200,000, but the U.S. Senate only paid them $2,000. The military completed Fort Snelling atop the bluff in 1825, and Minneapolis and St. Paul eventually emerged from these vast treaty lands in the years that followed.
Meanwhile, during this historic transition, Jean-Baptiste Faribault had been invited to settle his family and fur trading post on Pike Island. Later, in an 1820 treaty, the island was given to his Dakota wife, Pelagie Faribault. In 1862, after the six-week U.S.-Dakota War, Pike Island was the site of a concentration camp for 1,600 Dakota, an open-air prison for mostly women, children, and old men. Conditions were terrible that winter, and around 300 died when measles and other diseases tore through the camp. The survivors were relocated by steamboat to Dakota Territory.
So this island, the site of the Dakota’s origin story, is also central to Minnesota’s origin story and the location of one of our most brutal chapters, as well. But the Dakota survived, and still live among us, in what are now the Twin Cities. The island is now parkland, part of Fort Snelling State Park. And after you park in the lot, walk under the Crosstown bridge, with cars and trucks audible overhead, and cross over the Minnesota River on a little footbridge to the island, there isn’t much trace of the modern civilization completely surrounding you beyond these river bluffs. Down here, on the 3-mile loop trail cradled by the Minnesota River to the south and the Mississippi to the north, families like ours can encounter white-tailed deer, as we did, and wild turkeys, as we did, as they hike this ancient loop through the woods. There are joggers and dog walkers and kids fishing the river.
After our reverie when first encountering the confluence, we let our 2-year-old run around the beach before heading back into the sunset along the Mississippi side of the island. Fallen oak and maple leaves carpeted the sandy path, and huge pieces of driftwood lined the shore. Maggie handed our little guy a yellow maple leaf that he examined in his stroller before releasing it and watching it flutter back to the ground. The last of the day’s sunshine pooled and ran in orange and yellow streams downriver, a perfect metaphor for the powerful currents of time. 101 Snelling Lake Rd., St. Paul —Steve Marsh
“Looking out on Bdote…the thought of our collective steps overwhelmed me.”
A Maze of Color
Immerse yourself in the brightest world.
Maple is a thousand things.
It’s the syrup on your pancakes, glossy, brown. It’s the dresser set in your grandparents’ guest room, golden as fried chicken. It’s helicopters spinning down, those maple seeds with wings called samaras, as little kids run to catch them from the air and, finding a big one, throw it up toward the blue sky, hoping to make it spin again. Maples also are the squeak beneath the feet of the Timberwolves and Lynx, because they’re the regulation durable gold floor beneath every NBA player everywhere. Maple is likewise the glow of the floor at the roller rink, catching winks of the disco ball’s light as you glide smoothly along. Maple is the tree we want at hand as we go a hundred miles an hour: Maples may be the bird’s-eye veneer in your new Rolls-Royce Phantom and appear in certain particularly pretty Jaguars, Mercedes, and Bentleys. Maples helped give us our freedom when they made the stocks of the flintlock rifles we carried in the Revolutionary War. And what did Keith Richards, playing his custom-modified guitar, the Telecaster he called Micawber, and Prince, playing his Hohner he called Mad Cat, have in common? Maple guitar necks, prized by players who want to play fast. When you’re listening to Purple Rain or the Rolling Stones’ “Can’t You Hear Me Knocking,” you are hearing man and maple.
Maple: It is a thousand things, a million, a billion.
Steinway pianos are created with what piano builders call hard rock maple, from the tree we know as the sugar maple that gives us our daily syrup. If you’ve heard just about any classical music recording, or Billy Joel, Harry Connick Jr., Diana Krall, or Nachito Herrera in concert, you’ve heard the echoes of that which was for many years gold and scarlet in autumn, the roadway of chipmunks, and the home to sapsuckers, warblers, and thrushes.
Ask yourself this: Has anyone in the Twin Cities ever shuffled across their maple floors in the morning, glanced outside to notice a nuthatch walking down and about the maple planted in the boulevard, and poured maple syrup over their oatmeal while listening to the music of Prince or Chopin on the radio? Have you? If so, did you notice that you were in a world of maple—hearing it, eating it, shaded by it, standing on it—as surely as an owl nesting in maple is also within a maple world?
Anishinaabe culture has always been woven into the sugar bush—that is, the maple forest—and has always known that it’s human nature to take nature for granted. Legend says that long ago, the maple trees were simply filled with syrup, not sap, but it made the people lazy; they just laid on their backs under the trees, ignoring everything, drinking syrup. So Nanabozho, the hero, the trickster, came and poured water into the trees to dilute the sap. That’s how we were meant to learn the value of work and to appreciate nature, that the sweetness, the strength, the music that maples give us are not to be taken for granted.
Are we succeeding in this challenge, not taking maples for granted?
Do this. Go to the Minnesota Landscape Arboretum to see its 18 species of maple trees when they’re in their fall blaze like a circus of crimson and gold. To really do it well, first peek at the Arb’s website and social media: It keeps everyone well apprised of fall colors on-site, week by week. Then, pick out your outfit: sturdy shoes if you want to thread through the hiking trails or something fancy if you’re one of the hundreds (thousands?) planning to use the maple glory as a backdrop for senior photos, holiday-card shoots, or general fancy-dress glamour shots for the ’gram. Best advice: Go early. Advance tickets are recommended (and required on some days of the week); a membership is an awfully good idea (especially if you want to make a few trips in the season or throughout the year); and on peak-fall-color, beautiful-sunshiny-day weekends, the Arb absolutely will get to parking lot capacity. This means that if you arrive late, you’ll have to wait for a car to leave before yours can get in. Once you’re inside: Go! Go forth.
Go wonder among the maples, the ones knitted each to each like a circus tent of tentpole trunks and an infinite canopy of canary-yellow sky, the ones red as June strawberries, a splash of crimson against the towering clouds. As you go, discuss: Is this where maple lattes and roller rinks and music, so much music originates? Is this what creates the soul of so much of our pleasure? Yes, a thousand times yes. Look at the careful labels at the bases of the 18 species of maple: Here’s Acer negundo, the box elder maple. There’s Acer saccharum, the sugar maple. Did you know that a collection of maples is called an aceretum? How interesting, how odd: an aceretum—for you!
Do you have a good feeling about maples yet, the wonder, the magic?
Good. Now, please know the Arboretum has monoculture plots of mature trees of many species, with seemingly endless paved and dirt paths connecting them all, and a similar reverie could be penned about each. Birches: like those painted by Van Gogh, beloved for birch syrup in Finland and Latvia and carved in Russia for “wooden lace.” Oaks: used to create the ancient galleons and schooners that sailed the seas and to adorn the heads of Roman heroes as crowns, the famed and leafy corona civica, and their acorns provide food to forest dwellers like deer and foxes (seriously), and oak even feeds us, a little, when we drink its essence after aging our wine or whiskey in oak. Don’t forget the willows, pines, lindens, spruce, serviceberry—they all live at the Minnesota Landscape Arboretum, quite literally, in vast, bountiful collections growing and soaking up the sun under the Minnesota sky.
Trees! Glorious trees. So, let’s close with a pop quiz: If a maple tree is a thousand things, and if 700,000 visitors come to the Minnesota Landscape Arboretum every year to see nearly 6,000 species of plant and flower, doesn’t it add up to awe? 3675 Arboretum Dr., Chaska —Dara Moskowitz Grumdahl
Inside Take
Autumn at the Arboretum is beautiful but fleeting, so you have to get out there and soak it in while you can. Here are 10 things to do before the snow flies:
- Grab the perfect selfie or family photo by the waterfall in the Japanese Garden.
- Wander along the Green Heron Trail and take the boardwalk that traverses the marsh. Stop and listen for migrating songbirds and waterfowl.
- Journey to the highest hill, via paths or the 3-mile drive, to be awed by the vast Harrison Sculpture Garden that is encircled by glorious views.
- Explore the Sensory Garden and then wander into the woods along the trails that meander through the Wildflower Garden and the Shade Tree Collection and lead to the Prairie area.
- Stand amid the towering evergreen collection and listen to the wind whisper through the needles as they touch the sky.
- Let your inner kid go and get lost in the maze.
- Laugh at an unsuspecting scarecrow or marvel at a pumpkin and gourd display too big to count, all part of the Scarecrows, Pumpkins, and Harvest fall fun.
- Visit the AppleHouse, just down the road to the west of the Arboretum entrance, where you can buy apples, as well as pies, pastries, pumpkins, squash, gourds, gifts, and more.
- Visit the Ornamental Grasses Collection and marvel at the varieties as the wind makes them dance.
- Stop by the gift shop and then allow yourself to take a slow ride on the 3-mile drive before you leave so you can get your final soak in a flow of colors as you pass by several of the tree, shrub, and flower collections and plan your next adventure.
(And have no fear, this four-season wonder of a place is just as beautiful and ripe for adventure even after a dusting of the inevitable white stuff. Just think: Winter Lights in illuminated gardens, snowshoeing, cross-country skiing, and more.) —Rebecca Rowland