The Dallas Arboretum and Botanical Garden Children's Garden | Things to do with Kids in Dallas, TX

The Dallas Arboretum and Botanical Garden has been on my list of places to visit while in Dallas for the last 8 years. I was so excited this year when we had some extra time to visit with our boys. It was colder on the day we went, and we weren’t dressed warm to stay all day to see every thing, but what we did, we loved!

Since we’re members of the Missouri Botanical Gardens, we of course used our reciprocal network benefits and was able to go for free! In order to get tickets you just need to send a picture of your membership to customer service with the number of tickets included in your membership, a date and time you’re going, in addition to your ZIP Code. They email you back your tickets and a parking pass! It’s super easy to use. The children’s garden was $3 a person, and you’ll want to grab those at the main entrance or at Gate 3, by the children’s garden entrance. Parking to the garden was easy to find and entering was seamless as we just scanned the codes sent in their email.

I LOVED that there were places to get a coffee or tea to sip throughout the garden with lots of seating and picnic areas, too. Little cafes were throughout, including a grilled cheese kiosk!

Beckett smelled his first rosebush on our walk to the Children’s Garden. It was literally one of the most precious things seeing him smile so big after taking it all in.

Upon entering the Children’s Garden, there’s a splash pad in the entry garden that I’m sure is full during the summer time. We played in the “First Adventure” area for the majority of the time as it’s the space designed for younger children. There’s a caterpillar maze, a sandbox (that wasn’t ready for children to play in), giant acorns and insects, a potting shed, a tree house and slide, and a babbling brook water feature.

Another area had HUGE plants in pots that taught about the different parts of a flower with hopscotch!

The Kaleidoscope was so pretty with lots of patterns, shapes and reflections. This area of the garden had a lot of hands on features that taught about fractals, tessellations, symmetry and the Fibonacci sequence.

The Texas skywalk was a fun place to get a view from the treetops over the entire garden! There’s a climbing net that we had so much climbing in.

A water area, Pure Energy, showed how wind, sun and water can be transformed into electricity. While I don’t think any of these amazing STEM lessons were to our age of understanding, we had so much fun playing through these and can’t wait to come back to explore the rest of the garden!


Have you been? Would you go? Let me know in the comments!