Botanical gardens near Broken Arrow

Tulsa Botanic Garden

The biggest garden in the Tulsa area and the one most worth a dedicated trip: 170 donated acres northwest of downtown, with terraced floral beds, a two-acre children's discovery garden, a lotus pool and a nature trail through native prairie. Spring is the showcase, when tens of thousands of tulips and daffodils go in around the Garden Cascade. It is the only garden here that shuts for the winter, closing through January and February, and it runs ticketed evening events in the fall and a lights display in December.

Philbrook Museum of Art

Philbrook is an art museum first, but its 23 acres of grounds are the closest thing in the region to a formal European garden: beds and terraces laid out east of a 1927 oil baron's villa, following Italian, English and French garden ideas and modelled on Villa Lante. General admission of $22 covers the house and the gardens together, the highest price on this list, and the museum is closed Mondays and Tuesdays. Guided tours of the villa and gardens are offered and the gardens are ADA-accessible, with a free audio tour.

Woodward Park & Tulsa Garden Center

Forty-five acres of midtown Tulsa that the city bought in 1909 and turned into its public garden, and the place to go for roses: a terraced municipal rose garden built as a WPA project in the mid-1930s, plus rock gardens, an arboretum with a quarter-mile trail and a Victorian-style conservatory from 1924. The Tulsa Garden Center runs a free teaching garden on the grounds, along with classes and plant society meetings, from a historic mansion at the top of the hill. Nothing is ticketed, so it works as a short stop rather than a day out.

Honor Heights Park

The azalea park: 132 acres on Agency Hill that Muskogee bought in 1909 and planted into the region's biggest spring flower display, celebrated with an Azalea Festival every April. Beyond the azaleas there is the Conard Rose Garden, an arboretum, a dogwood collection, a white garden, five fishable ponds and three walking trails, plus the Papilion butterfly house open from Mother's Day weekend through September. Entry is free and it draws crowds again at Christmas for the Garden of Lights. Come in April if you can; outside the bloom it reads more as a large city park than a garden.

Washington Irving Memorial Park & Arboretum

The closest arboretum to Broken Arrow, about fifteen minutes south in Bixby: 32.5 acres of labelled trees with the Laci Dawn Hill Butterfly Garden, an amphitheater built as a replica of Washington Irving's Sunnyside home, a statue of Irving along the wooded trail, and memorials to the Murrah Building bombing and to September 11 that include a steel beam from the World Trade Center. It is free, self-guided and open from 7:30 in the morning until late at night. Expect a walk among trees and memorials rather than flower beds.

Lendonwood Gardens

A nonprofit eight-acre garden near Grand Lake that punches well above its size: one of the largest false cypress collections in the United States at more than 80 varieties, about 250 varieties of rhododendron, and eight themed areas including a Japanese pavilion, an English terrace garden and an American backyard garden, threaded with streams, waterfalls and a koi pond. Rhododendrons and azaleas peak in April and May. Adults pay $5 and the gate is open dawn to dusk year-round, with an honor box inside when the welcome center is closed. It is about an hour and a half northeast of Broken Arrow, so pair it with the lake.

The Botanic Garden at Oklahoma State University

Oklahoma State's teaching garden, going since 1935, spread across a 100-acre site in Stillwater that mixes an arboretum and research plots with the studio gardens where the long-running Oklahoma Gardening television show is filmed. The studio gardens are the part to walk: themed beds for Oklahoma natives, shade perennials, rock and patio gardening, a Japanese garden and a rock-lined water garden, each set up to demonstrate a technique you could copy at home. Over 1,000 species of plants and free to enter, but it is open weekdays only and the Oklahoma Gardening area closes on Wednesdays for filming.

Jo Allyn Lowe Park

A 31-acre Bartlesville city park built around a fishing lake, whose draw is a large arboretum of hundreds of tree and shrub species, many planted in memory of someone, alongside wildflowers and flower beds that change with the seasons. A pioneer log cabin, the G.L. Potteiger cabin, was moved here and restored in the late 1980s. It is free, open from six in the morning to eleven at night, and has an accessible fishing pier, restrooms and picnic shelters. This is a neighborhood park with exceptional trees rather than a destination garden.

The Puterbaugh Center (Garrard Ardeneum)

The least known garden on this list and the one with the best story: the coal magnate J.G. Puterbaugh built his house on the hill above an old rock quarry in McAlester, and in 1990 the grounds opened to the public as the Garrard Ardeneum, a coined word for art, garden and museum. Rock steps drop from the house into quarry trails lined with flowers, and the redbuds and azaleas are at their best in early spring. The gardens are free and reachable at any hour. The building itself now works mainly as a wedding and conference venue, so treat this as a garden walk rather than a museum visit.

Satsuki Garden

A half-acre Japanese garden in Grove, designed by Dr. Leonard Miller, the same person behind Lendonwood Gardens a couple of miles away. It holds the three elements Japanese landscaping is built on, plants, water and stone, arranged around a koi pond, a stone pathway, a bridge and a deck to sit on. It is free, unfenced and open at any hour, and photographers come for it in spring when the azaleas and dogwoods bloom. Realistically a fifteen-minute stop, best combined with Lendonwood on the same trip.

The Gardens at Central Park

The only public garden inside Broken Arrow, opened in May 2025 after roughly fourteen years of campaigning by Keep Broken Arrow Beautiful and built with money from a 2018 city bond. It runs to 33,000 square feet on the west side of Central Park, planted as several linked gardens: pollinator and monarch beds, herbs, prairie, fragrance and roses, with a pergola, an entry plaza and a water feature. Rose rosette disease forced a redesign partway through, away from masses of roses toward smaller groups protected by barrier plants. It is new and small, so the planting has not filled in yet, but for anyone in town it is a five-minute drive.