Brookside Gardens is an award-winning 50-acre garden maintained by Montgomery County, located within Wheaton Regional Park. The park is free to all and features a variety of specially curated gardens that suit a wide range of aesthetics and styles. Some of the featured gardens include Aquatic Garden, Azalea Garden, Butterfly Garden, Children’s Garden, Rose Garden, Japanese-inspired Gude Garden, Idea Garden, Rain Garden, and the Woodland Walk. Each garden has its own unique qualities, which make it stand out from the others. This helps create each of the distinguished “rooms” of the Brookside Gardens. In addition to the one-of-a-kind gardens, the park is home to two ponds, conservatories, and a very educational “School’s Outside” garden program, where children can deepen their knowledge of many natural sciences concepts, such as plants and pollinators or erosion and landscapes. Besides being a great place to take children to pique their curiosity about nature and science, the gardens also offer local gardeners helpful resources and workshops to help them develop and maintain their own hearty gardens.
Youthful Fun and Learning
During the summer of 2025, the Children’s Garden underwent a theme revamp. It became the new and improved Eco Friends Garden, which showcases an upgraded Playhouse with a spectacular four-sided mural designed by five local artists. The mural celebrates nature and highlights the critical role of many local flora found throughout the gardens.
Pre-K – Grade 1
The Children’s Garden is also where many of the park’s educational youth programs take place. Tuesdays through Fridays, Brookside Gardens offers 90-minute field trips with a variety of activities. Students in PreK-K can participate in the Plants and Pollinators program, where they meet with a guide who helps them learn the basics of plants before potting a plant of their own to take home.
For grades one and higher, students can participate in a similar extended program in which they will expand on the basic ideas taught to younger grade levels and learn more in-depth about the structural anatomy of plants and the crucial relationship between plants and pollinators.
Grade 4 & 5
For students in these grades, the park introduces students to more physical natural sciences, with fourth graders allowed to learn about how water and erosion physically affect the structures of nature. With the Erosion & Water on the Landscape program, students will learn to navigate using a map and collect data through observations of their surroundings for signs of erosion, the water cycle, and native plants. At the end of the day, students will make their own native seed balls to take home and grow.
For students in grades five and higher, the Water Quality in the Watershed program offers a comprehensive examination of the park’s very own “brook”. It gives students hands-on experience with chemistry tools to learn more about the local waters, mainly the Chesapeake Bay.
More Outdoor Fun!
In addition to the field trips, Brookside Gardens offers numerous other exciting programs and events that everyone can enjoy. For younger children, there is Sprout Yoga! and Story Time Garden. For the whole family, there is always something new and interesting happening, like Montgomery Park’s Garden of Lights, where “winter nights sparkle with more than a million twinkling lights!”
