The Mendocino Coast Botanical Gardens

The Mendocino Coast Botanical Gardens are located on 47 acres and offers everything from colorful floral displays to crashing waves. The weather makes it a garden worth visiting year-round. It includes formal gardens, a coastal pine forest, native flora and habitats, fern-covered canyons, camellias, rhododendrons, magnolias and conifers, heaths and heathers, and coastal bluffs overlooking the ocean.

In fact one travel brochure I read called the gardens “a jewel on the Pacific Coast.”

The gardens were created in 1961 by retired nurseryman named Ernest Schoefer.  The Grand Opening of the Gardens was in 1966. By 1992, the Gardens had been purchased with grants from the California Coastal Conservancy and transferred to the Mendocino Coast Recreation and Park District.

Inside the gardens are trails and vistas, unlike any I had hiked on or to, and well worth the cost of admission. They also come with convient places to sit and rest a spell if you need to do so — which is how I happened upon this seat in the middle of a conifer forest and surrounded by ferns.