Rocky Mountain Botanic Gardens Home




The Gardens are open. Come visit!

The gardens are freely open to the public daily from dawn to dusk. They are located 0.5 miles from Lyons Main St., near the intersection of 4th Avenue and Prospect Street. Park on the street near that intersection, and take the path towards Bohn Park to the Gardens entrance (approximate address 100 4th Avenue, Lyons).We ask that bikes and dogs remain outside the garden space. Our regular volunteer hours are currently Tuesdays, Fridays and Sundays,  9 AM - 11AM, April - December, weather permitting. All are welcome! Please bring gloves, water, and your favorite garden tools. 

See a MAP to get to RMBG on the About/Contact/Map page.


Sunflowers, Helianthus annuus, August 6, 2021




Colorado Four O'Clock, Mirabilis multiflora, August 4, 2021



Prairie Grasslands garden, July 17, 2021

Volunteer days are back! Garden with us.

We are resuming our regular volunteer sessions! The first one of the season was held Sunday, April 11, 2021. We'll be at the Gardens working every Sunday, Tuesday, and Friday, 9 – 11 AM through the spring, summer, and fall. All are welcome. Come when you can! Sessions are cancelled if it’s raining, snowing or very windy. We will continue to stay safe by wearing masks and keeping 6 feet apart while we work. Our gardening this year will start out with some spring weeding and tidying, and then we’ll do lots of planting. We look forward to seeing you out in the beds!


Donate!

If you share our vision and love of plants, you are invited to help us create the Rocky Mountain Botanic Gardens. We are a 501(c) 3 nonprofit organization accepting donations to purchase plants, equipment and water as part of our startup costs. Our federal tax payer ID number (EIN from the IRS) is 83-1572868.

Please mail donations to:

Rocky Mountain Botanic Gardens, P.O. Box 613, Lyons, CO 80540

303-656-1909: Text or Call

You Can Donate by Credit Card--Simply Call or Text to Arrange!

We have another bench!


We have another bench!

This bench was donated to our garden by the Hunt Family. Don and Mary Hunt used to live in the mobile home park that was on this site until it was destroyed in the 2013 flood. They lived right on the corner where our patio is, and had a beautiful flower garden surrounding their mobile home, with colorful irises that Don generously dug up to share with friends and passersby. 


Pictured: Mary Hunt with RMBG volunteers

We have installed the Hunt bench on the side of the patio, right about where their backyard pond was. 
There is an engraved iris on the bench, and we have planted Rocky Mountain Iris in the meadow just 
behind the bench.

The Lyons Garden Club, our friends in Lyons’ botanical beautification, generously donated this bench. 
They chose an uplifting message to display on it, ‘A walk in nature walks the soul back home’ -Mary Davis. 
By next fall, this seat will be surrounded by Purple Aster (Aster laevis) flowers, thanks to a late-season planting effort the following Sunday by regular RMBG volunteers Linda Talley and Emily Walker. The bench came from local stone company Lyons Sandstone, and Charles Mason at Boulder Works Inc. engraved it.



Imagine resting for a cool drink in the summer’s heat on our new benches, or spreading your watercolors out on them to capture the colors in bloom on a perfect spring evening – it will be much appreciated by garden visitors to come. Many thanks to Mary & Don Hunt, the Lyons Garden Club, the Lyons Volunteers, and all involved! 

Our Mission

Our mission is to foster an understanding and an appreciation of our Rocky Mountain native plants and wildlife, and to create a place where Lyons locals and all visitors to the garden of all ages can learn, and enjoy the peace and beauty of the natural world.

Our Vision

We are creating an outdoor botanic garden in a natural setting for the benefit of the community of Lyons and visitors from Colorado and beyond, to enjoy now and for future generations. 

Botanic Garden Overview

The garden will feature native plants that grow in the foothills surrounding Lyons as well as plants from the mountains above Lyons, riparian areas along rivers, grasslands to the east of Lyons, and plants from the southwestern part of Colorado.

The Rocky Mountain Botanic Gardens will be the first botanic garden in Boulder County, Colorado. The foothills environment of Lyons, where the mountains meet the prairie grasslands, is an exceptional setting for a botanic garden.

Visitors will be able to discover native plants that will do well in their yards with little watering or special needs, as well as learning the names of Colorado plants that they see while outside hiking, biking, walking or participating in other outdoor activities. There will be small signs in front of our plants to identify both their Latin and common names. We think of our garden as nature with name tags!

We are a nonprofit organization in Colorado and have our 501 (c) 3 status from the IRS. Our garden will be free and open to the public all year, with donations accepted. We plan to offer classes such as native plant identification, gardening with native plants, and attracting bees and butterflies to your garden.


Little Free Nature Library


Who knew...that we needed ANOTHER Library in Lyons? Check out our "Little Nature Library" installed on the 4th Street side of the Botanic Gardens site (near the Bohn Park pedestrian bridge). The focus is on subjects of NATURE; donate a book, or borrow and return one that interests you. Purchase of the Library was funded primarily through a grant from the Lyons Community Foundation, and by the Rocky Mountain Botanic Gardens.