Bamboo Brook Outdoor Education Center

A 700-acre estate garden designed by Martha Brookes Hutcheson.

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Bamboo Brook is a 700-acre property with one of the few surviving designed landscapes in the U.S. by Martha Brookes Hutcheson, one of the first American women to practice landscape architecture professionally. Hutcheson and her husband bought the farm in 1911 and spent the next decades shaping the formal gardens, terraces, and water features that survive today.

Owned and operated by the Morris County Park Commission. The site is run as an outdoor education center; school groups make heavy use of it on weekdays. Weekends are quieter.

What’s there:

  • The formal Hutcheson gardens, including a water-lily pool, a perennial border, and several enclosed garden rooms;
  • The Bamboo Brook trails, which connect to the adjoining Willowwood Arboretum (a separate Morris County Park Commission site, about a 10-minute walk through the woods);
  • Open meadows, old stone walls, and the historic farm complex.

Free admission and parking. Willowwood is a worthwhile add-on: a 100-acre arboretum with 3,500 species of plants on the former property of Henry and Robert Tubbs.

About 35 minutes west of Morristown. Pairs with Cooper Gristmill for a half-day in the Chester area.