Garden Walk Buffalo is a trip worth taking
BUFFALO, N.Y. — America’s largest garden tour is not in Pennsylvania’s Brandywine Valley or the Pacific Northwest, two meccas for gardeners. It is a mere 3½-hour drive north of Pittsburgh.
If you’re a gardener, or if you just have a free weekend to check out a great American city, do yourself a favor and check out Garden Walk Buffalo on July 28-29. Now in its 24th year, the free tour draws more than 65,000 guests from the U.S., Canada and beyond, to visit 362 creative urban gardens.
Buffalo is much like Pittsburgh — an old industrial city with a nice stock of historic and older homes. Garden walkers find a wide range of landscape styles, from clipped formality to meadow or cottage wildness.
One of the best ways to see the possibilities for your own garden is to tour gardens in the same growing zone. Buffalo and Pittsburgh are both in USDA Zone 6. The scale of these gardens is approachable for most homeowners. Many have been featured on the tour since its inception in 1995.
The gardens are in Buffalo’s urban neighborhoods and are
open to the public from 10 a.m.-4 p.m. both days. Shuttles are provided to navigate guests from several areas to the neighborhoods, which include the mansions and Victorians of the Delaware District, Elmwood Village and Allentown, the oldest historic district in Buffalo. Some gardens surround Craftsman-style bungalows in Parkside, near Frederick Law Olmsted’s Delaware Park. Others are in the Cottage District, where factory workers lived in small Italianate cottages on postage-stamp lots now planted to perfection.
Check out the Harry Potter garden with a shed that any gardener would covet, or a calm shade garden in green and white under a massive oak tree. One colorful home has a complementary cacophony of equally colorful plants.
There is a renaissance happening in this Rust Belt city that is worth the trip. Just as Pittsburgh is embracing its waterways as destinations, so too is Buffalo. Canalside, on the shore of Lake Erie at the terminus of the Erie Canal, is the highlight of Buffalo’s waterfront development (www.canalsidebuffalo.com). To see more flowers, visit the Buffalo and Erie County Botanical Gardens (www.buffalogardens. or the Proven Winners Trial Gardens at the Erie Basin Marina (www.eriebasinmarina.
Garden Walk Buffalo is free and self-guided; no tickets are required. Five free hop-on/hop-off shuttle buses with guides from Explore Buffalo run continuously both days. Go to https://gardensbuffaloniagara.com/events/ garden-walk-buffalo for further details or check out the great Garden Walk video at the Buffalo visitors website, www.visitbuffaloniagara.