Highfield Discovery Garden - Erin's Travel Notes

We visited the Highfield Discovery Garden at Glenwood Gardens in July 2022. I had been wanting to visit this children’s garden for several years and was so happy it finally fit in our schedule! This garden has many opportunities for play and exploration.

To enter the Discovery Garden, you walk through a cottage converted into a gift shop. They sell interesting garden related objects for kids and adults. You can also find restrooms here and pay your admission for the Highfield Discovery Garden.

The discovery garden is visually appealing and had many areas that interested everyone in our party. There is a fairy garden to see. There are plants growing vegetables. A pond is in this area too. We were able to see fish and tadpoles in the pond. The flowers in the discovery garden were very pretty. We found bridges to cross and mushrooms to climb on.

One area is a butterfly garden. The flower beds are shaped like butterfly wings and the flowers in this area attract butterflies.

There is a model train area in the garden. A few different small trains were running on the track surrounded by bridges and trees.

There is a tea house perfect for having a pretend tea party inside. We also enjoyed the porch swings outside of the tea house.

A garden center contains some educational exhibits. They had some snakes, insects, a bunny, and other small animals to see. There were a few other hands on activities for kids in this building.

The centerpiece of the Discovery Garden is a large tree house for climbing. This tree house is a large pretend tree with a face. There are several tunnels and stairways to explore.

We found some scavenger hunt papers available in mailboxes throughout the garden. A naturalist offered a short program about the wildlife in the pond during the time we were there.

Highfield Discovery Garden is part of Glenwood Gardens . The rest of Glenwood Garden is a free admission area. There are a couple of different walking paths allowing for several miles of walking if you’d like. Some paths are paved and some are gravel. Our visit was focused on the Discovery Garden, but we did walk part of the paved trail of the Garden Loop. It wasn’t what we expected. There were not groomed gardens in this area. It was more of a natural meadow and wooded areas. The paved path was wide and easy to walk on.

We enjoyed our visit to Glenwood Gardens and specifically the Highfield Discovery Garden. Glenwood Gardens seemed like a nice city park with walking trails. It was similar to many parks near our home. The Highfield Discovery Garden portion is the unique part. It was very cute and very well done. It was definitely worth going out of your way to visit if you have kids 12 or under. If you live outside of the Cincinnati area, I’d combine your visit here with other area attractions.

When you visit, bring your own water and snacks as none are available. I would plan to stay for 2-3 hours.