We’re lucky to have so many amazing gardens to visit near us, most of them for free.  (And boy, can public gardens be expensive to see.)  I’m visiting all 16 gardens in the DC area that are open to the public and making videos showing what they look like, by month.

So first up, the underused treasure that is the National Arboretum, so close to Greenbelt, in all its May glory.

A very different garden that we can visit is almost as close to Greenbelt.  It’s the stunning Franciscan Monastery, which is just now entering its peak bloom time.  The roses are late this year, like so many other plants.

There are four more videos of DC-area gardens in May right here.  They’re part of my new volunteer project, just two months in development, so not fully stocked with content, but it has me visiting all these glorious places regularly for at least a year, to photograph them early and late each month.   The project is called DC Gardens.com.

Video Coaching from Former Greenbelter

And wouldn’t you know this garden project has an interesting Greenbelt connection?  I had made a couple of videos, bravely put them online, and waited for the suggestions from readers, which suggestions indeed poured in because the videos were error-filled.  But thankfully, one commenter was Marcia Van Horn, the former Greenbelter who made this cool video of our garden tour last September.  She found my plea for help on the blog GardenRant, and volunteererd to coach me.

Which she did and wow, in our techy, digital world it’s such a relief to sit down in person with a coach at your own computer!  About an hour with Marcia led to a 1,000%  improvement in my videos, all using the totally free Microsoft Moviemaker and free and legal music.