Every year the Ragan Canal Garden goes through two amazing transformations. If you have visited Stowe before you may be familiar with the Canal Garden's long brick pathways, palm trees, the epic view of the Piedmont Prairie and Prairie Castle Playground and the beautiful ceramic fish sculptures leaping in the fountain.
The intention behind the Canal Garden is to provide seasonal plantings showcasing lush tropical plants, exciting annual plant displays and a vibrant, colorful setting for weddings, photoshoots or a casual stroll. Each bed has a unique focus. The Canal Garden's outer beds feature amazing tropical plants including Swamp Mallow Hibiscus, Banana Trees, enormous Alocasia and Colocasia, and Canna Lilies (just to name a few). The inner beds are the focus of fresh seasonal designs that change each spring and summer, providing an abundance of color and inspiration for your gardens at home.
The design process for these seasonal beds begins six months before planting. Planning for the summer design begins in January and is planted just before Mother's Day. (Big thank you to Carolina Asthma and Allergy for sponsoring the 2026 Spring Planting!). As the weather cools, this design is replaced by cool season flowers in the first week of October.
By contrast, the winter garden is planned during the dog days of summer. This display often features cold hardy pansies, snapdragons, kale, heuchera, delphinium and grasses that will survive harsh frosts and even our region's occasional snow.
Replacing each design can be heartbreaking. Here is the Canal Garden when it reached peak fullness and growth, about a week before being pulled out. Thankfully, most of these plants are nearing the end of their life cycle at this stage.
Canal removal process
Adding the compost
Tearing out the Canal Garden is a group effort. There are more than a dozen horticulturists at Stowe. The entire team works together to remove old plants and take them to the green waste area for composting.
After the plants are removed, the soil is prepped by the team with weeding, raking and adding a nice layer of compost to help feed the soil, deter weeds and help improve water retention.
After the soil is prepared, we review our plans and designs. The entire rip out and prep process can take an entire day, or sometimes two days depending on the weather. Fortunately, this year the weather was beautiful and we were able to get it done in a few hours. The annual plants are brought from the staging area near our greenhouses, out to the Canal Garden where they are arranged by bed.
After the plants are brought to the Canal Garden and organized by design, they are laid out in their beds to make transplanting easy for our amazing team of volunteers and other Stowe employees who volunteer their labor. Thousands of plants need to go in the ground and having as many hands as possible speeds up the process.
Annuals at the greenhouse
Annuals in pots laid out in Canal
This process is usually done by the Formal Gardens Team, following plans and drawings made specific to each bed. Canal's inner beds are each alphabetized, and each bed is intended to be unique. No two plantings are the same but the goal is always a riot of color, variety of texture and an assortment of heights for visual interest. Laying out the beds usually requires an entire day, or two days depending on the complexity of each planting and the number of plants.
One important thing to consider when designing at home is spacing! Spacing is often overlooked. If plants are placed too close together the design can't breathe and plants may end up smothering each other, becoming a tangled mess, or developing fungal issues due to poor air circulation. Place your plants too far away however and you may end up with huge blocks of negative space and exposed soil, which can cause soil to dry out, allow weeds to take over or cause a visual disruption. Always read the ideal spacing for your plants, which is often provided on their identification tag, or on the pot itself.
Here is a picture of what our winter planting will look like once the weather has warmed up and plants break their dormancy. It's incredible that these plants not only survive our winter, but flower through the long cold season, and then explode once spring arrives.
Planting the Canal Garden is an enormous undertaking. From concept, to design, and finally execution, making sure our seasonal displays continue to flourish is a community driven effort. A special thanks to the brilliant employees and volunteers of Stowe who make this project possible not once, but TWICE a year—and to you, our visitors, who make planting a garden worthwhile. We hope your walk down the Canal Garden helps you find your path to nature.
