ADS Display Garden Program

The Smith Gilbert Arboretum in Kennesaw, Georgia is a 15-acre property containing a restored 1840s antebellum plantation farm house and seven acres of gardens and outdoor sculpture.  The gardens contain a beautiful perennial bed across the lawn from the house, conifer circles planted with dwarf conifers and a rock garden surrounding three cascading pools overlooked by a Japanese style garden house.   The prominent feature is a series of woodland paths with hundreds of blooming trees, shrubs, and woodland plants.  Scattered throughout the garden are thousands of daffodils that bloom from late December through early April.

After completion of the house restoration, Dr. Robert Gilbert and Richard Smith began to create this garden in the early 1980s.  An article on American daffodils sparked their interest in daffodils and they planted hundreds of Mitsch daffodils in 1985.  They continued to plant hundreds of daffodil bulbs every year afterwards, so that today there are approximately 150 cultivars, encompassing all thirteen divisions, growing throughout the garden.  Dr. Gilbert sold the property to the City of Kennesaw, Georgia in 2004; with the help of a group of Master Gardeners, it continues to add significant numbers of bulbs to the daffodil collection every fall, focusing on American and historic daffodils.