Named for its donor, a noted supporter of horticultural projects, this stunning garden presents elaborate flower beds and borders, plant-filled turn-of-the-20th-century urns, 1870s cast-iron furnishings, and lush baskets hung from reproduction 19th-century lampposts. Although on ground level, the garden is actually on a 4 1/4-acre rooftop above the subterranean Ripley Center and the Sackler and African Art museums. An "Island Garden" near the Sackler Gallery, entered via a 9-foot moon gate, has benches backed by English boxwoods set under the canopy of weeping cherry trees. A "Fountain Garden" outside the African Art Museum provides granite seating with walls overhung by hawthorn trees. Three small terraces, shaded by black sour-gum trees, are located near the Arts and Industries Building. And five majestic linden trees shade a seating area around the Downing Urn, a memorial to American landscapist Andrew Jackson Downing, who designed the National Mall. Downing's words are inscribed on the base of the urn: "Build halls where knowledge shall be freely diffused among men, and not shut up within the narrow walls of narrower institutions. Plant spacious parks in your cities and unclose their gates as wide as the gates of morning to the whole people." Elaborate cast-iron carriage gates made according to a 19th-century design by James Renwick, flanked by four red-sandstone pillars, are placed at the Independence Avenue entrance to the garden.

Copyright: Excerpted from Frommer's Washington, D.C. 2009, (c) 2008, Wiley Publishing, Inc.

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