United States National Arboretum
Friendship Garden
The Friendship Garden has long been conceived as a kind of naturalistic prototype for a residential garden. The Friendship Garden surrounds Arbor House at the Arboretum’s R Street entrance. Once a caretaker’s residence, Arbor House is now home to the Friends of the National Arboretum and the National Bonsai Foundation. As an update to the original design done by Wolfgang Oehme, Phyto Studio designed a stylized savanna garden using ecological species and more naturalistic layering of species. This update boldly removed some of the hedges and invasive species that made the space feel small, and by planting a series of more open canopy trees, reconnected the garden with the oak woodland beyond and visually tie the landscape together.
Statue of Demeter. Photo by Rob Cardillo.
Vertically layered flowering perennials emerge out of a matrix of grasses and groundcovers.
Penstemon digitalis and Baptisia alba
This former residence now serves as gateway and gift shop; the planting is designed to be a model for more ecological garden style planting. Photo by Rob Cardillo.
Connecting this garden to the oak hickory woodland that surrounds it was major design move of the garden.
The garden is animated with a series of seasonal themes that change weekly.
