Drive past Jenkins Arboretum & Gardens on Berwyn Baptist Road in late May and you will fight for a parking spot. The rhododendrons and azaleas are in bloom, the same week the crowds descending on the Devon Horse Show a few minutes away are looking for something quieter to do between classes in the Dixon Oval. One visitor's Tripadvisor review put it plainly: this is where you go when you're in town for the horse show and need a break from the grandstands.
Drive past in September and the lot is half empty. No color explosion, no crowds, just a woman with a stroller and someone walking the 1.2-mile loop around the pond. It looks like the off-season. It is not.
The Week Everyone Remembers, the Season Worth Tracking
Jenkins built its reputation on six weeks in spring. That reputation is accurate and also incomplete. The arboretum's own event calendar for this fall runs longer, deeper, and with more distinct programs than anything scheduled around the bloom. Where spring gives you one spectacle, fall gives you a rotation: children's nature classes, guided walks organized by theme, a virtual lecture series, and a headline event in December that has nothing to do with plants at all.
The fall calendar is there, dated and specific, and it says something the spring rush doesn't: this is a place designed to be used, not just visited once a year.
Here is what is actually scheduled on the grounds this season, drawn straight from Jenkins' own listings.
| Program | Dates | What It Is |
|---|---|---|
| Jenkins Juniors (Session 1) | Sept. 8 – Sept. 29 | Four Tuesday mornings of outdoor exploration for ages 2-5 |
| Fall Wednesday Walkabouts | Ongoing, started Sept. 2 | Weekly guided walk through the garden |
| Photo Walk | Sept. 19 | Self-guided photography session, 9 a.m. |
| Bird Walk | Oct. 12 | Guided birding walk, 8 a.m. |
| Jenkins Juniors (Session 2) | Oct. 6 – Oct. 27 | Second four-week run for ages 2-5 |
| Celebrate the Season | Nov. 17 | Nature program on wild turkeys and late-fall wildlife |
| Winter Luminary Nights | Dec. 11 & Dec. 12 | Evening lantern-lit walk, 6:30 p.m. |
Two things stand out once you see it laid out this way. First, Jenkins Juniors doesn't run once. It runs twice, back to back, covering nearly two full months of Tuesday mornings. Second, nothing on this list requires the garden to be in bloom. The programming is built for a garden that looks like September, not May.
Two Sessions, Same Instructor, No Overlap
The Jenkins Juniors program is worth a closer look because it is the clearest evidence that fall here is treated as a full season, not a lull between the real event and the next one. Each session runs four consecutive Tuesdays, led by Amy Mawby, the arboretum's Education Manager. Every class follows the same format: a story, a walk through the grounds, and a craft to take home.
What makes this notable is the scheduling, not the content. Rather than run one continuous fall session, Jenkins splits it into two distinct four-week blocks, September 8 through 29 and then October 6 through 27, with a short gap between them. That is a program built by someone thinking in seasons, not in single events. A garden trying to check a box for "kids' programming" runs one series and moves on. A garden treating fall as a genuine second calendar runs two.
The same instructor carries that thread into November with Celebrate the Season, a program built around wild turkeys and what local wildlife does as the weather turns. It is a small detail, but it tells you the fall calendar isn't an afterthought stitched together from whatever was available. It has a throughline.
The Lecture Series Beyond the Azaleas
Alongside the walks and the children's programs, Jenkins runs a Third Thursday Lecture Series, held virtually and free to attend. One topic in the series was fungal ecology in the Philadelphia region, led by Sam Bucciarelli, president of the Philadelphia Mycology Club, covering how to identify local fungi and the role they play in the surrounding ecosystem.
That is not a garden coasting on its azalea reputation. That is an organization with enough programming depth to run a recurring lecture series alongside its seasonal garden displays. If the spring bloom is what gets Jenkins onto a Devon Horse Show visitor's itinerary, the lecture series is what keeps it relevant to the people who actually live three streets away and never stopped in for the flowers at all.
What This Means If You Live Here
None of this requires registration or a ticket to enjoy on a basic level. Entry to Jenkins is free, a detail more than one visitor has noted with some surprise given the quality of the grounds. The 1.2-mile trail circles a pond and runs through a woodland walk shaded by a mature tree canopy, and one Tripadvisor review captured the September experience well: even when there are few flowering plants there is a lot to please the eye.
That is the practical case for treating this as a fall destination and not just a spring one. You do not need the azaleas to justify the trip. You need forty-five minutes and a reason to be outside, and Jenkins has built an entire second calendar around exactly that premise. The Wednesday Walkabouts alone give you a standing weekly excuse that has nothing to do with waiting for a specific bloom to peak.
If you already live in Devon, the version of Jenkins Arboretum most people carry around in their head, a pretty stop for one week in May, is only half the picture. The other half runs from early September through mid-December, is better documented than most residents realize, and asks nothing of you but showing up.
If you're weighing what it might mean to put down roots somewhere with this kind of everyday texture, places that reward the people who actually live there and not just the ones passing through for a single event, that's a conversation worth having. The Houder Nuñez-Strid Team works across Devon and the rest of the Main Line, and we're glad to talk through what a neighborhood like this actually offers day to day. Schedule a Confidential Market Consultation whenever you're ready.
