Cylburn Arboretum in Spring Bloom

The Garden on the Hill: Cylburn Arboretum in April

Cylburn Arboretum occupies 207 acres on a hill in northwest Baltimore, and in April it becomes the most beautiful place in a city that does not always get credit for beauty. The magnolias bloom first - great saucer magnolias with petals the color of ballet slippers - and then the dogwoods follow, and then the azaleas detonate in pink and coral and a white so bright it makes you squint, and by mid-month the entire hillside looks like a Monet that got rained on and ran.

I drove up Greenspring Avenue and turned onto Cylburn's entrance road, a narrow lane that climbs through a canopy of old-growth tulip poplars. The mansion appeared at the top - a stone Victorian built in 1863 by Jesse Tyson, a Baltimore industrialist with excellent taste and very deep pockets. It now serves as the administrative building and nature museum, and on the April morning I visited, the wisteria on the south wall was in full bloom, cascading down the stone in purple ropes that smelled so intensely sweet I could taste it at the back of my throat.

The grounds are divided into formal gardens and woodland trails, and the two experiences are so different they feel like separate parks. The formal gardens - curated beds of perennials, a shade garden, a demonstration vegetable garden - surround the mansion with the kind of deliberate beauty that rewards slow walking. I spent twenty minutes in the circle garden, where tulips in seven shades of red were arranged in concentric rings that radiated outward like ripples in a pond. A Baltimore oriole landed on the edge of a birdbath, dipped once, and departed, trailing water like a tiny orange comet.

The woodland trails are another world. I followed the Cylburn Trail south into the forest, where the canopy closed overhead and the understory erupted in wildflowers. Virginia bluebells carpeted the slope in sheets of blue. Trilliums - white, three-petaled, impossibly delicate - dotted the forest floor like stars in a green sky. The trail descends through oaks and beeches to a stream at the bottom of the hill, where I sat on a log and listened to the water negotiate its way over rocks with the polite persistence of a Baltimore hostess rearranging dinner seating.

Cylburn is free and open daily from dawn to dusk. The parking lot at the mansion is small - fifteen cars at most - so come early on spring weekends. Dogs are not permitted, which means the wildlife is bold. I counted four species of warbler in thirty minutes without binoculars, and a red fox crossed the trail ahead of me with the nonchalant confidence of a creature that knows it is the most beautiful thing in the forest.

Come in April. Come in the morning. Bring a camera you trust, because your phone will try its best but the light through those dogwood blossoms is a problem that technology has not yet solved.