Editor’s Note: This week, Linda Schreiber is writing to tell you about Project GREEN’s Open Garden Weekend. I hope I will see you at Project GREEN Gardens, 820 Park Road, where I will be signing my book, “Garden Walks with Judy.”
For nearly six decades, Project GREEN has led efforts to enhance the beauty of the Iowa City area while advancing its core values of environmental stewardship, conservation, and education.
Those efforts have blossomed into Open Gardens Weekend 2026, a free event made possible through generous business sponsors. The annual event takes place from 4-8 p.m., Saturday, June 27, and from 10 a.m. to 2 p.m., Sunday, June 28. Visitors may tour participating gardens whenever a sign reading “The Garden Is Open” is displayed.
Eighteen gardens are featured on this year’s two-day tour, making Open Gardens Weekend a true destination event. Visitors from neighboring communities are encouraged to plan an overnight stay, allowing time to explore more gardens, dine at local restaurants, and discover the many attractions the area offers.
The two-day event offers garden lovers an opportunity to visit beautiful landscapes, meet fellow gardeners, and simply enjoy spending time outdoors. The featured gardens range from small secret gardens tucked into urban spaces to expansive landscapes that showcase years of creativity and care. Each garden is unique, yet every one is special.
Gardening is widely considered an art form — a living art and perhaps the slowest of the performing arts. It combines design, color theory, and spatial arrangement to create spaces that change with the seasons. A garden can feel like living within an artist’s painting. Here, gardeners develop their own artistic voice, creating compositions rich in shape, color, texture, and mood.
Yet while garden design is artistic, successful gardening relies equally on science: botany, soil chemistry, ecology, and climate. Great gardens require both the imagination to envision a beautiful space and the knowledge to nurture it. Open Gardens Weekend is an inspiring opportunity to see how gardeners have transformed ordinary outdoor spaces into places of beauty and wonder.
The centerpiece of the tour is Project GREEN Gardens, an eight-acre showstopper along the Iowa River. Beautifully maintained grounds and dozens of themed gardens greet visitors at every turn, while smaller gardens and benches line the Iowa River Trail that forms the western edge of the property. The parking lot has been beautifully landscaped with plants and giant limestone blocks.
A shade and understory garden complements the sidewalk leading to Ashton House, a historic mid-century home listed on the National Register of Historic Places in 2001. Built by a noted bridge engineer, the house is renowned for its architectural significance and serves as an elegant focal point for the gardens. Additional shade gardens immediately surrounding the home and located nearby feature landscaping worthy of a stately private residence.
At the trailhead welcome garden dubbed the triangle, where Park Road meets Rocky Shore Drive, visitors will find a Little Free Library fashioned after the historic home. Nearby stands a striking bird blind—a metal architectural wonder complete with limestone seating for quiet observation.
Red, white, and blue flowers dot a garden honoring the nation’s 250th Anniversary. Annual flowers fill a square garden that volunteers call the quilt garden.
Two prairie gardens showcase native species that once covered much of Iowa before settlement transformed the landscape. In late spring, peonies descended from the gardens of Nancy Sieberling, one of Project GREEN’s founders, fill the grounds with color and fragrance.
Additional amenities include a gazebo, paved and soft-surface trails, benches, a water fountain, a fire ring and grill, decorative light bollards, stone entry columns, and a bike rack with a repair station.
And, very soon, a large sculpture, titled “Lunar Horizon” by Nick Goergen, will be installed on the grounds. Project GREEN Gardens has space to add more displays to the landscape.
These enhanced gardens benefit local, regional, and statewide visitors alike, restoring and strengthening a treasured public greenspace in a mature urban neighborhood near Iowa City’s downtown. Open Gardens Weekend is more than a garden tour — it is an invitation to experience the beauty, creativity, and community spirit that continue to flourish in Project GREEN Gardens.
This article originally appeared on Iowa City Press-Citizen: Garden Walks: Open Gardens Weekend is a tourism opportunity | Column
Reporting by Linda Schreiber, Special to the Press-Citizen / Iowa City Press-Citizen
USA TODAY Network via Reuters Connect
By Linda Schreiber, Special to the Press-Citizen | USA TODAY Network
