#8 Kenilworth Park and Aquatic Gardens
Today I got up bright and early to visit Kenilworth Aquatic Gardens in DC and see the lotuses and water lilies in bloom!
It's key to get there before the blooms close up in the heat of day by 2pm. We also wanted to catch the 9:30am Park Ranger tour.
The gardens were started in the 1880s when Walter Shaw moved to DC to work for the Treasury Department and decided to plant water lilies from his home in Maine in an ice harvesting pond on his property. By the 1920's, his daughter Helen Shaw Fowler turned the family garden into a water lily and lotus producing business.
In the 1930's, when the Army Corps of Engineers started dredging the river around her for housing, destroying the marshes that the aquatic plants depended on, Helen Shaw Fowler fought for the water gardens to be saved. In 1939, the National Park Service took over management of both the aquatic gardens and the conserved tidal marshlands around it.
You can walk along the boardwalk to see part of the real swamp that DC used to be!
The visitor center has greenhouses and concrete demonstration ponds where they can grow the plants over the winter. They then transplant them into the many huge, hand-dug ponds.
It was a fun summer morning activity, but we were very glad for the strong metro train AC when we were heading home!
Item 8 Completed 7/6/19
14/43 items complete = 32.5%
It's key to get there before the blooms close up in the heat of day by 2pm. We also wanted to catch the 9:30am Park Ranger tour.
The gardens were started in the 1880s when Walter Shaw moved to DC to work for the Treasury Department and decided to plant water lilies from his home in Maine in an ice harvesting pond on his property. By the 1920's, his daughter Helen Shaw Fowler turned the family garden into a water lily and lotus producing business.
In the 1930's, when the Army Corps of Engineers started dredging the river around her for housing, destroying the marshes that the aquatic plants depended on, Helen Shaw Fowler fought for the water gardens to be saved. In 1939, the National Park Service took over management of both the aquatic gardens and the conserved tidal marshlands around it.
You can walk along the boardwalk to see part of the real swamp that DC used to be!
The visitor center has greenhouses and concrete demonstration ponds where they can grow the plants over the winter. They then transplant them into the many huge, hand-dug ponds.
It was a fun summer morning activity, but we were very glad for the strong metro train AC when we were heading home!
Item 8 Completed 7/6/19
14/43 items complete = 32.5%
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