Tour Inside the Private Gardens Fayetteville Has Been Growing for Years
Seven Fayetteville homeowners are giving you a rare look at what years of digging, planting, and tinkering can build when no one’s watching. Some gardens took a decade. Some started with a single phone call to mom. All of them have something to show you.
THE DEETS
📅 Saturday, June 6, 2026
⏰ 9:00 a.m. – 4:00 p.m.
📍Locations:
- Washington County Cooperative Extension Service Office | 2536 N. McConnell Avenue, Fayetteville
- A Love of Gardening Shared by Two | 3750 N. Pine Manor Drive
- Fresh Start | 411 W. North Street
- The “O-Fish-All” Oasis | 422 W. Cleburn Street
- Lucky Old Sun Garden | 215 E. Davidson Street
- Welcome Garden | 220 E. Lafayette Street
- A Window Without Walls | 425 N. Olive Avenue
- Jardin Aceituna | 603 N. Olive Avenue
🎟️ $20 per person | Children ages 6–11 free with adult ticket holder
🔗 More info | Get Tickets | View Garden Locations on Google Maps | Download the Tour Map
More Than a Walk Through Someone’s Backyard
The 2026 Garden Gate Tour puts you inside eight distinct spaces, each shaped by the people who made it, with subject matter experts stationed throughout the day to share what they know about soil testing, composting, beekeeping, food preservation, water quality, soil blocking, and landscaping with native plants. If you’re a home canner, bring your lids for on-site safety testing.
You can also watch a raised garden bed get built from scratch at the Washington County Extension Office, and lend a hand if you want in on it. Drawings at the end of the day give you a shot at winning a rain barrel, rain gauge, or one of the two raised beds built during the tour.
Eight Stops, Eight Stories
At A Love of Gardening Shared by Two (3750 N. Pine Manor Drive), a mother-daughter pair have built three spaces side by side: a cottage garden, a perennial garden with shifting textures and seasonal color, and a native garden designed to draw in songbirds and pollinators.
Fresh Start (411 W. North Street) is exactly what it sounds like. The homeowner bought his first house in 2025 and, with a nudge from his Master Gardener mom, turned a lot with “amazing trees and a few misplaced shrubs” into a layered shade garden of ferns, heucheras, hostas, and astilbes, with a hugelkultur bed in the back and native plants catching the morning sun on the east side. As he puts it: “First year they sleep, second year they creep, third year they leap.”
The “O-Fish-All” Oasis (422 W. Cleburn Street) has been a decade-plus project for a family of four kids and seven grandchildren, most of them living within two blocks of each other. The garden is designed to be savored from the wrap-around porch, with soft lamb’s ears, lilac-scented corners, cloud-like hydrangeas, and native coneflowers and black-eyed Susans keeping the pollinators busy through summer.
Lucky Old Sun Garden (215 E. Davidson Street) reads like a personal archive. Over one hundred hostas fill the shady backyard, and a brick patio was laid using historic bricks from Coffeyville, Kansas, the homeowner’s grandparents’ hometown. A couple of the vintage patio chairs belonged to her great-grandparents. Flea market finds are tucked throughout.
Welcome Garden (220 E. Lafayette Street) grew from a specific kind of nostalgia. The homeowners describe it as a recreation of their grandparents’ gardens, with white picket fences, honeysuckle-covered arbors, and the smell of lilac. On their half-acre lot, they fenced, tilled, and planted with the goal of creating a space where both people and wildlife might pause to enjoy the warmth, color, and welcome their grandparents once shared.
A Window Without Walls (425 N. Olive Avenue) draws its design from four decades of travel to France. A formal French parterre garden anchors the space, with miniature manicured boxwoods framing colorful annuals that change every year. The centerpiece is a stone window from a manor house in Normandy, installed as the lighted focal point of the garden.
Jardin Aceituna (603 N. Olive Avenue), “Olive Garden” in Spanish, began as a question the owners posed to themselves: could an ordinary suburban yard become a habitat for bees, butterflies, birds, and people at the same time? Over ten years, they replaced lawn with a wildscape for fireflies, planted a native prairie east of the sidewalk, and layered the space with rhizomatous perennials and self-seeding annuals that shift year to year.
The Washington County Extension Office Gardens (2536 N. McConnell Avenue) anchor the tour with a different kind of depth. The Compost Demonstration Site will be open for self-guided exploration, Extension Service staff will be available to discuss soil testing, plant disease diagnosis, food preservation, and water quality, and representatives from Washington County 4-H Clubs and the Washington County Fair will be on hand to share gardening-related activities and events for kids and adults.
A Few Things to Know Before You Head Out
The private garden locations don’t have public restrooms, and many sites are not accessible for wheelchairs, strollers, or wagons. The terrain includes uneven ground and unpaved paths. Pets should stay home for this one. The tour runs rain or shine, and passes are non-refundable.
Proceeds from the tour go toward supporting educational programs for the public on topics of interest to gardeners.
If you’d rather pick up your pass in person before tour day, the Washington County Extension Office has you covered on June 4 from 3:00–5:00 p.m. and June 5 from 10:00 a.m.–12:00 p.m. Grab your pass, map the route, and show up ready to see what Fayetteville’s gardeners have been quietly building.
