Student field trips, family festivals, teacher workshops, science nights, ecology clubs, environmental education camps, and a diverse array of adult symposia and workshops serve thousands of participants each year. From our youngest learners, participating in Sweet Pea Club and school field trips, to our life-long learners pursuing Certificates in Native Plants or attending informal trail walks—our programs address the need to understand and care for the environment. Many of the programs also provide practical guidelines and opportunities for lightening our ecological footprint.

Pitcherplants chowing down at the Insect-ival festival

The Garden's 313 acres of cultivated gardens, forests and streams are an exciting outdoor classroom and a living laboratory for many of our activities. Learning how the earth's ecosystems support our lives is the cornerstone of many of our learning adventures. Our programs embrace an experiential, multidisciplinary approach to learning for young learners, teachers as well as adults.

Our popular field trip programs are conducted for students, grades K-12, on Tuesday through Friday mornings, throughout the school year. Teachers choose from a variety of program options that meet the state standards for the Georgia curricula. Our Adventure Packs program serves the needs of self guided groups. Each backpack contains maps, activities, plant hunts and forest explorations, to be completed in different areas at the Garden.

Five week-long environmental education camps are conducted during the summer months. During these weeklong adventures, children develop the seeds of an environmental ethic while exploring the natural and cultivated areas of the Garden.

Our Garden Earth puppetry program helps thousands of children fall in love with Earth and her creatures each year. Through our entertaining puppet characters, young learners develop empathy for other creatures as well as ecological understandings as they meet Foreco, the forest ecosystem and her cast of eco-service managers and workers.

The annual Give Wildlife a Chance poster contest, strengthens our mission to teach sustainability through multidisciplinary programming. Our active Science Night programs provide meaningful outreach to Georgia schools. Family festivals including Insect-ival and Forest Festival enrich the lives of thousands of families each year.

The Beekeeping Series is one of our most popular.

We offer a wide variety of programs for adults. The Certificate in Native Plants (CNP) offers a comprehensive series of short courses in identification, cultivation, propagation, and conservation of Georgia plants. Additional adult programs of note include the 20 session Master Gardener Program, our popular Beekeeping Series, the Perennial Symposium held each October and the Native Plant Symposium held annually in January.

Our mission is strengthened by our professional development programs for educators. We offer three Certificate programs for Georgia teachers. These include: Garden Earth Naturalists, the Endangered Plant Stewardship Network, and Our Shared Forests. We embrace the theory that by educating one teacher we reach hundreds of children who are the future stewards of our planet.

We hope you will join us in these learning adventures!