Charlotte Brody Discovery Garden

The Charlotte Brody Discovery Garden is a sustainable, organic food garden that displays, demonstrates and teaches about plants that provide people, animals, birds and insects with food and shelter.

Here, visitors can learn about organic vegetable and fruit gardening, understand water management through rain gardens, participate in hands-on classes, see how chickens, bees and other creatures help plants to grow, and explore composting, traditional cob structures and more.

Discovery Garden Highlights

A food garden with a variety of herbs and other plants growing in the foreground, and a barn and trees and blue skies in the background.

Burpee Learning Center

This barn was created from two historic tobacco barns in eastern North Carolina. It serves as a space for learning about farming and food gardening, as well as about North Carolina’s history of tobacco farming. Under the eaves are picnic tables where visitors can relax and read about the many organic food crops growing in the garden. Learn More >

A row of immature green gourds with long necks dangling from a trellis.

Southeastern Indigenous Peoples Garden–Summer & Fall 2024

Duke Gardens grows on the lands of several Indigenous Nations. These peoples have and continue to nurture and celebrate their lands in ways that provide home, shelter, and sustenance in harmony with the plants and animals also living here. This garden display highlights a selection of plants that have significance and importance to Indigenous peoples of this land, including citizens of the three Cherokee Nations. Learn More >

A close-up of the pale purple, green and cream sage clary flower and deep green leaves.

Herb Garden

Follow your nose to this patchwork of perennials, shrubs and annual herbs of every use from medicinal to culinary. You may see curly parsley, several basil varieties, calendula in shades of orange, yellow and red, as well as clary sage (pictured), lavender, thyme and so much more.

An adult sits in a wooden chair in an outdoor patio holding a book that four children are looking at as they sit on tree stumps. Several other adults look on, and there's a colorful cabinet in the background.

Story Circle

This shaded nook is designed to promote diversity, representation, belonging and children’s self-exploration. You’ll find tree stumps to sit on and read a book from the Black Lit Library, building blocks to play with, the Black Lit Library to explore, drawing paper to make pictures and write notes, and much more. The newly redesigned space incorporates literature, art and diverse perspectives to expand the Gardens’ outdoor educational offerings for children. Learn More >

A person in a yellow dress stands smiling in an outdoor setting next to a colorful, whimsically shaped cabinet containing books.

Black Lit Library

The Black Lit Library is a curated collection of children’s books featuring diverse protagonists and characters of color. These books will be available for visitors to read and use in the space whenever the Gardens are open. This initiative was created by Victoria Scott Miller, founder of Liberation Station (pictured). “Our goal is to give a child of color an ounce of territory and assurance that they are and will remain the protagonist in their own stories,” Miller says. Learn More >

Nature Play

The Story Circle space also features a stone table with adaptive, nature-themed play materials and educational activities incorporating self-reflection, self-portraits and affirmations. The goal of all this is to ensure that visitors to the space feel seen, welcomed, celebrated, cherished and loved for who they are.

Pollinator Houses

Take a peek at the various pollinator houses in the Discovery Garden to see all the different shapes and sizes of shelters that each species favors. We want our pollinators to have happy homes in the Discovery Garden!

Bee Hives

Bees play an important role in any garden, but they are also critical to human survival. Did you know that bees polllinate 80 percent of the plants on Earth, including one in three bites of food that we eat. One quarter of the roughly 20,000 bee species on Earth are imperiled. Here you can learn how to help our imperiled bee friends.

Chicken Coop

This spacious coop was created sustainably with reused lumber from a 125-year-old Oxford textile mill. Visitors can observe the chickens and learn how chickens can help support healthy gardens.

Large wooden compost bins with plant waste piles in them, with trees and blue skies behind them.

Composting

Visit these demonstration compost bins to learn how plant waste can become nutrients for new plants. Did you know that Duke Gardens composts and mulches plant waste from throughout Duke University? Since 2019, we have produced almost 400 cubic yards of compost and mulch per year. That operation happens backstage, but this learning station shows what a home garden approach could look like.

Cob Arch

Cob is a material in a family of the oldest and most widely implemented building systems found throughout human history. A mix of clay-rich subsoil, sand, and straw, this simple mixture of elements yields a material which, when stacked upon itself, forms a wall which is fireproof, seismically sound, mold and rot-resistant, and comparable in strength to concrete.

CSI Award Honors

The Charlotte Brody Discovery Garden was chosen as one of three sites for the 2015 Landscape Architecture Foundation’s Case Study Investigation (CSI) Award. This award is highly competitive and is internationally significant across landscape architecture programs and the profession at-large.

The produce from the Charlotte Brody Discovery Garden is donated to local families through a partnership with Iglesia Presbiteriana Emanuel. You can help community members in need by leaving the plants in the ground to grow.

Learn How You Can Help Local Families ›