It’s a searing, cloudless July day at the Denver Botanic Gardens on York Street and people are living their best plant lovers life.

The masses have flocked to wander the 24-acre living museum on what was once an old cemetery and potter’s fields during this free-admission day, one of eight such days every year.

About 45 minutes away, the gardens’ sister property, Chatfield Farms, with 700 acres of native plants and a working farm in Littleton, is similarly bustling. The lavender fields are blooming, rehearsing to awe the crowds during the annual mid-July Lavender Festival, and the vegetable patches are oozing tomatoes, peppers, beans, carrots and kale for the gardens’ CSA (community supported agriculture) members and SAME Café Denver, a donation-based, nonprofit restaurant, and other no-cost grocery organizations.

“I love the mission of having a positive impact on people. You see that every day, just being a place of respite and healing and education,” said Erin Bird, director of marketing and communication for the gardens.

“The work we do for research and conservation is critical and relevant. A lot of it is related to climate change and the impact on plant communities and wildfire and how to provide food to urban communities that don’t have access to fresh-grown food.”

At York Street, visitors have come to commune with almost 50,000 plants in a multitude of exhibits around the property, including the internationally inspired Shofu-en Japanese Garden, with its small, bonsai-like ponderosa pines harvested by permit from Rocky Mountain National Park in the 1970s and trained by the garden’s horticulturists in the nature of bonsai, an ancient Japanese art form.

On this sunny, painfully dry day on the Front Range, it’s fitting that folks tread through the 18 gardens featuring plants that thrive in our Colorado climate, including the Cactus and Succulent House, Dwarf Conifer Collection and Roads Water-Smart Garden, where the Utah agave is quite visibly calling it a day.

In March, after 25 years of existence, the rare, non-native agave began growing a towering, flowering stalk, indicating the Greenery Grim Reaper was near.

“It’s what’s called its death bloom,” Bird said. “The horticulturist likes to call it its grand finale. Once in its life, it puts up this massive flower stalk, and then it dies.”

The plant’s only chance of survival is through pollination of its flowers to produce seeds, but since the agave is the only one of its kind at the gardens, successful pollination and seed production are unlikely. Death is imminent.

“Circle of life,” Bird said.

The gardens’ mission is simple: Connect people with plants. Mission achieved. They do it through dozens of exhibits and events throughout the year, including the popular, often sold-out summer concert series; the equally popular and photogenic holiday light extravaganza Blossoms of Light; a corn maze; Pumpkin Festival; and Trail of Lights, Chatfield Farms’ holiday event.

Young and old traipse the grounds, visiting internationally inspired gardens, like the rock alpine and steppe gardens, the latter of which is a quarter-acre collection of tough, unique plants from steppe biomes across the globe with similar climates, soil type and elevation to Colorado.

Ornamental gardens, such as the Scripture Gardens, feature plants from the Fertile Crescent, the ancient region of the Middle East, selected to symbolize stories from the Jewish, Christian and Muslim faiths. The Ann Montague Iris and Daylily Garden is home to more than 200 varieties of iris and 150 types of daylilies, along with other bulbs and perennials that bloom from early spring to mid-summer.

Colorado summers are good times to walk through one of the shady gardens, like the Birds and Bees Walk, where plants were selected for their ability to attract bees, butterflies and hummingbirds, or to lounge by a water garden, like the Monet Pool, the largest on the property, with its aquatic plants, like water lilies, cannas and iris. There’s also the Boettcher Memorial Tropical Conservatory, an enormous, midcentury-style building that achieved Denver Landmark Status in 1973 and houses the gardens’ tropical collections from South America, Asia and Australia.

“Plants are part of our living collection in the same way as an art collection or natural history collection,” Bird said. “We do have most of it recorded and track performance.”

Interspersed between the exhibits are two giant heads gazing at each other, along with other monumental art installations in “A New Humanism,” an exhibit by world-renowned Spanish artist Jaume Plensa, whose work spills from outside to inside the gardens’ three gallery spaces. It’s up through Sept. 7.

“All the art we bring is meant to offer people a new avenue to connect with the natural world,” said Katie Foster, assistant curator of exhibits. “That’s the underlying mission — giving people an opportunity to reflect on nature differently and think about their place in the natural world as humans who are maybe not so separate from nature, but a part of the natural world itself.”

While the perennial gardens on York Street stay the same, the annual gardens and bulb displays are varied every year, with new species and color palettes.

“If a visitor lives in Colorado, the gardens is a great inspiration place to think about their home landscape, as we face water restrictions and continual climate change and drought,” Bird said. “We are a perfect spot to see plants in action, like ‘Wow, that is something low-water, but still beautiful and not just a rock.'”

Humble beginnings

The Botanic Gardens began as a community project 75 years ago, in 1951, when volunteers used stones from the mountains and plants donated from home gardens to transform a bank of dirt in Denver’s City Park, next to the Denver Museum of Nature and Science, into the first iteration of the gardens. The small plot is still there today, mostly a rose garden.

After people snuck in, under cover of night, to uproot the plants, the gardens moved in 1958 to their current, more secure location on York Street, on acreage that was once Congress and Cheeseman parks.

“It’s very petite compared to our peer gardens, like the New York Botanic Garden, that are hundreds of acres, but because of that, every inch is meticulously curated and planned, and you see so many plants,” Bird said.

For those who love a side of spooky, Cheeseman Park was originally a cemetery. Before the gardens took stewardship of the land, almost all the remains were exhumed, minus one section, which was more of a potter’s field, a free public burial ground for unidentified and unclaimed bodies and the poor.

The gardens lean into the lore every fall with their Ghosts in the Gardens storytelling tours.

“Some of the dead weren’t in caskets or marked in the ground, so when we’re doing construction renovation projects and digging deep, it’s not uncommon that we encounter some bones and contact the coroners’ office,” Bird said.

In addition to the living collection of plants and its art collection, the gardens also house natural history and library collections. Chatfield Farms is considered a fifth museum, thanks to its origin as an historic homestead, Hildebrand Ranch.

“Sometimes there’s a perception we’re just a park or a place to look at plants,” Bird said, “but we are an accredited, certified museum because we have the living collections, just like a zoo.”

Chatfield Farms

Managed in cooperation with the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers, Chatfield is a haven for history buffs, birdwatchers, butterfly connoisseurs and lovers of the natural world.

Before the Hildebrand family bought the property along Deer Creek in 1866, which included a log cabin built by Euro-American settlers, the land had been used for thousands of years as hunting, gathering, and camping grounds by Native Americans, including the Ute, Cheyenne and Arapaho.

Original structures from the farm and ranch, which the family operated for more than a century, are still standing, including the renovated original log cabin, a restored 1918 dairy barn, 1874 schoolhouse, icehouse, stable and milking barn. Hildebrand Ranch is on the National Register of Historic Places.

In 1975, the gardens started leasing the property, but it wasn’t until 1990 that Chatfield opened to the public.

“It was supposed be one of the largest arboretums between Chicago and San Francisco,” said Jennifer Trunce, associate director of horticulture at Chatfield Farms. “It was called Chatfield Arboretum for a while and then eventually, with our CSA, we evolved into a full-fledged farm between the pumpkin planting and corn maze.”

Today, visitors can wander along 2 1/2 miles of trails, look for birds in the shade garden and riparian loop, and explore the hoop house that houses Butterflies at Chatfield Farms, a joint venture between the gardens and Butterfly Pavilion in Westminster, open from Memorial Day to Labor Day.

More than 300 native Colorado butterflies, such as swallowtails, monarchs and painted ladies, swoop inside among the native plants. The installation is intended to educate the public about native insects, specifically the endangered monarchs.

“When you’re educating from a young age you take that behavior further into your life, as an adult and into conservation advocacy,” said Courtney Meihls, communications manager for the gardens. “If a child gets excited about what a caterpillar looks like and recognizes it in the wild and recognizes the important role it plays, they’re going to take better action later to take policies and actions that preserve that.”

Chatfield is also a testing ground for plants, like lavender. Horticulturists explore what species and types thrive in the Colorado climate and report that data to nurseries and greenhouses, all in the name of sustainability.

“Lavender is a big draw because it’s not something you typically experience in a backyard, but it’s something we can grow,” Lucas said. “We have two unique varieties tolerant to Colorado, and over 25 different varieties right now.”