Take a Walk Through Our Garden
The Demonstration Garden at the State Fair of West Virginia provides a growing-season-long educational and inspirational resource to visiting groups and thousands of visitors throughout a majority of the year and especially during the State Fair. At the Fair in 2025, one visitor told one of our volunteers: “I came here two years ago for the first time, and this garden changed my life.”
Planted and maintained since 2003 entirely by our volunteer members, the more than 200 varieties of perennials, annuals, vegetables, trees, shrubs and vines give visitors the chance to explore ideas for their own home gardens while they enjoy the lush beauty on display. Children enjoy the playful side of gardening, where they can step into a bean teepee, become a monarch body, visit Freda the Frog and delve in the sandy bug dig. Home vegetable gardeners can find the pick-of-the-crop in the Heritage Garden, where varieties are all winners of the All-America Selections program.
This year, with help from a grant from the West Virginia Master Gardeners Association, our perennial plantings are now identified with permanent identification labels, and additional information about those plants will be provided on this website in the future. At the State Fair, volunteers are available from 10 a.m. to 7 p.m. to talk with visitors and answer questions.
The Perennial Garden
Perennial plants live more than 2 years, dying back in winter and growing back in spring, providing a low-cost and low-maintenance way to enjoy a vibrant garden. They adapt to most any environment and offer long seasons of color, returning year after year with blooms, fragrance and beauty, while supporting pollinators like bees, butterflies and beneficial insects. The perennials chosen in this garden are easy to grow in your own home garden.
The Children's Garden
The Children's Garden provides a variety of experiences to stimulate children's interaction with nature through textures, fragrances and colors of plants as well as insects and aquatic wildlife. The interactive pathway invites children to slow down, explore, and connect deeply with nature through touch, smell, and sight.
Little ones can hide away in a leafy vine teepee, meet tiny, winged fairies, and experience a beautiful variety of textures, smells, and colors of flowers and plants. At the end of their journey they can participate in a keepsake photo at the Monarch Wings Station. Our goal is to allow children to play and discover plants and nature at their own pace.
The Herb Garden
Our herb garden showcases perennials, tender perennials and annuals that can be grown in your West Virginia home gardens for culinary, medicinal, aromatic, and ornamental uses.
The Memorial Garden
This small garden provides a quiet corner for reflection and rest. It shows how the use of a limited color palette can provide a calm beauty in keeping with remembrance of lost friends.
The Raised Bed Garden
Small plantings can have a big impact on your environment. Raised beds provide easier access for anyone with mobility limitations. The size of the raised garden can vary according to the space available around your home or apartment.
Almost any container can serve as a raised garden from something manufactured to something like a wheelbarrow, for instance. Flowers, herbs, small shrubs and even fruit trees can be grown in raised beds.
The Shrub Garden
Shrubs and grasses can be utilized to add contrast in any garden, often requiring little effort to maintain their appearance. Many types of plants in this selection add winter color and texture and some provide beautiful flowers in season.
The Pocket Meadow
The Pocket Meadow was started in Spring 2026. The term 'Pocket Meadow' just means a small-scale naturalized garden that can take the place of part or all of a lawn area.
It is the perfect solution for anyone looking to increase biodiversity and practice self-reliant land management. A meadow garden often takes two to three years to reach its full potential. Come visit us each year to view its progress!
The Orchard
Small varieties of fruit trees and shrubs can be grown in limited space gardens. Our selections concentrate on the grape, apple, peach and berry plants. Each type of fruit selected will require pruning to maintain the structure and productivity of the various plants.
An example is a technique referred to as espalier that encourages growth along a fence line or even the side of a house as demonstrated by the apple trees beside the Heritage garden. Also notice the tomato plants growing from straw bales in front of the grape vine.
The Heritage Garden
All-American Selections (AAS), is a non-profit organization that provides suggestions for choosing flowers and vegetables that have been tested for performance by horticultural professionals across North America.
Plant selections and updates can be found on the web at All-americaselections.org. This year, our Heritage garden showcases vegetables and flowers chosen from the AAS selections.
For 2026, we are also concentrating on the importance of mulch and the variety of materials that can be used in the garden.
