The Children’s Garden at Morton Arboretum in Lisle, Illinois is an incredibly popular spot for families. After our latest visit, we are sharing our best tips for visiting with your family. Keep reading for a list of Children’s Garden highlights, ideas to make your visit easy and fun, plus tips for saving money at Morton Arboretum.

First, let’s start with a quick overview of the Morton Arboretum and its Children’s Garden.

Morton Arboretum: General Information

The Morton Arboretum is located in Lisle, Illinois west of the city of Chicago. It is like a massive park with a combination of gardens, natural landscapes and areas for recreation. The Morton Arboretum is huge: 1,700 acres huge! There really is more than you can cover in one visit, so we suggest choosing a few places to focus your time and making a plan to return in the future.

The Morton Arboretum does charge for admission. Your admission covers parking and general entry for your party. The Children’s Garden is fully included with general admission, and you will be able to wander the trails through the gardens, prairies and wooded areas. Add-ons with extra fees include seasonal offerings, the “Acorn Express” tram, and you can purchase food and merchandise at the visitor center. Some special events, like Glass Pumpkin Patch, are included with general admission, others, like “walking plays,” require a special ticket.

When you arrive at the Morton Arboretum, you will show your admission at the gatehouse. From there you can park in any of the 33 (whoa!) parking lots and enjoy the grounds. Admission is cheaper if you purchase online, but you can buy yours at the gatehouse if you wish. We have more tips on saving on admission later in this post.

Overview of Morton Arboretum Children’s Garden

The Children’s Garden is just one part of the Morton Arboretum, but it is the favorite part for many families with young children. To enter the Children’s Garden, children under 16 years of age need to be accompanied by an adult. You will pass through an entry gateway where a staff member is counting heads and checking that all kids are accompanied, but you do not need to pay an extra admission fee here. Once you are inside the Children’s Garden, you will encounter a series of special themed areas.

Picnic Pavilion & Restrooms

You’ll first enter a lush area with an entry plaza and winding pathways. Up on your left will be a large multi-tier picnic pavilion and a building housing restrooms. Take note of this location as you enter: these are the only restrooms in the Children’s Garden. And, we have more on picnicking at the Morton Arboretum later in this post.

Backyard Discovery Gardens

Also off the entry plaza are two general areas for exploration. If you veer right, you can enter one of these areas through a marked archway labeled “Backyard Discovery Gardens.” In the Backyard Discovery Gardens, your kids can wander pathways through colorful foliage to find play structures with nature themes (think tree-root slides and giant acorns) or build their own structures with wooden blocks and other “loose parts.”

The Backyard Discovery Gardens are full of little leafy nooks and crannies, which makes it a great place to explore, but it also means that there are lousy sight-lines here. Some of the paths also turn into bridges and tunnels. We suggest making a plan with your kids for how you will cover this space, and keep in mind that the archway is not the only exit point. Also make lots of time for the play structures!

Adventure Woods

Adventure Woods is probably the highlight of Morton Arboretum for many kiddos. To reach this fun natural play area, you will proceed through the entry plaza and under a rustic looking archway. This is in keeping with the more rustic and natural theming of this play area.

Here, you will find Wonder Pond, which is a spot where kids can skip over stepping stones, wade, and generally get wet (more on preparing for that in a bit). There are even frogs and fish in Wonder Pond. And, flowing into Wonder Pond is a stream where kids can go wading and build dams with loose rocks and sticks.

Also part of Adventure Woods is the “Evergreen Lookout” area where kids can traverse a kind of net bridge and generally enjoy being in the trees. If you have not visited recently, you should know that this area has been modified, but it is still very popular with families.

Our Top Tips for You Visit to the Children’s Garden at Morton Arboretum.

Finally, here are our straightforward tips for making your visit to the Children’s Garden fun and easy for your group or family.

1- Check a Map

Morton Arboretum is huge, and the Children’s Garden is itself pretty big at 4 acres. We definitely advise looking at a map before you enter. Yes, it can be fun to explore and get a little lost, but that can be a trickier proposition when you are with little ones. The Children’s Garden has forking twisty paths and some changes in elevation. All of this, plus the kind of dense foliage you would expect at an arboretum, comes together to make keeping track of kids a bit tricky.

We find it is best to make a plan with our kids for how you plan to experience the Children’s Garden at Morton Arboretum. We look a the map together and discuss what we plan to visit when. The tricky thing about the Children’s Garden is that you can see multiple exciting highlights from certain vantage points. We find that having a planned order helps our kids feel confident they will get to see all the fun stuff, and they are less likely to scatter. Here is a map for the Children’s Garden from the Morton Arboretum website.

Unlike most places we visit in Chicagoland, Morton Arboretum actually does not have a mobile app. If you like to use your device for directions, we advise snapping a photo of one of the Children’s Garden maps before entering. You can screenshot the one linked above or take photo of a map sign at the Morton Arboretum. You will also be able to collect a paper map when you enter at the parking gate.

One feature we really appreciate about the Children’s Garden is that there is ultimately just one entrance/exit, and it is staffed. This does give us some peace of mind. Children under sixteen must enter and exit with an adult.

2- Consider a Stroller

And on the subject of the Morton Arboretum being so big (again, 1,700 acres), we also suggest bringing a stroller for little ones. You will need to trek from parking to the Children’s Garden itself, and the area inside Children’s Garden can be a tiring walk for little ones. When we bring a stroller, our youngest is glad to have a break from the walking and a sheltered place to take a little refuge from the weather and from the high activity.

Morton Arboretum has a mix of paved and unpaved trails. We like bringing our “jogging” stroller with larger wheels for traversing places like the Morton Arboretum. We have seen families with large wagons and stroller wagons, but we do not own one of those. I am not sure how they would do in some of the more natural spots, but much of the Children’s Garden has paved pathways.

A Note on Paved Pathways and Accessibility at Morton Arboretum and the Children’s Garden

According to the Morton Arboretum website:

The majority of the Children’s Garden is accessed by paved paths and accessible wooden bridges. The typical grade is 2%. Several areas of the Garden have additional routes of entry by a rope bridge, stairs, or ladders. Accessible restrooms, including a family restroom, are located in the Central Plaza near the picnic pavilion. The partially covered picnic area, with accessible picnic tables, is typically available whenever the Children’s Garden is open.

If you want to see more about accessibility, included accommodations for visitors with sensory processing needs, explore this Morton Arboretum page.

3- Bring a Change of Clothes

The most popular offerings at the Morton Arboretum Children’s Garden involve water and mud. Specifically, the Wonder Pond is a huge draw for kiddos. We suggest bringing a change of clothes (or even two) for your children. The Wonder Pond invites kids to get wet, and you cannot stand next to it for five minutes without seeing a child slip off of a stepping stone. There is just a very good chance your kids are going to get wet whether they plan to or not.

Note that many children do wear swim attire to the Children’s Garden, but Morton Arboretum does not encourage this. On their website and on signs posted around the Children’s Garden, the Morton Arboretum says, “to keep the garden experience safe and comfortable for all visitors, we ask that children wear regular clothes (not swimsuits) and stay within the designated water play areas.” For our part, we wear quick-drying clothing and water shoes. (Actually, our advice for what to wear to Disneyland really applies here too, so for ideas about quick-drying clothing, see this post, and for sturdy water-friendly shoes, see this one.)

We also bring a change of clothes with us. You can find a bathroom between the Children’s Garden entrance and the water play areas”Wonder Pond.” Look for the huge green leaf picnic structure, the bathrooms are in the building beside this picnic area.

4- Pack a Lunch for the Morton Arboretum and the Children’s Garden

Speaking of the picnic area, there are lots of picnic tables for your use here, and you are absolutely free to bring food and non-alcoholic beverages into Morton Arboretum. We like to bring our own lunches, snacks, and reusable water bottles. We eat at the picnic tables in the pavilion near the Children’s Garden bathrooms. There is a nice view over the adjoining gardens and water.

You are allowed to eat at picnic tables and on area of mowed-grass. You are not allowed to bring alcohol or grills to Morton Arboretum.

We like to bring our own food to attractions whenever possible in order to save money and enable more visits in the future. We do this everywhere from Brookfield Zoo Chicago to Disneyland Resort, but, if you prefer not to pack your own food, you are able to purchase food at the Gingko Restaurant and Cafe at Morton Arboretum. Just keep in mind that concession are located in the visitor center rather than the Children’s Garden.

5- Save Money with Discounted Tickets or a Membership

On our latest visit, we used a pass from our local library which allowed four of us to park and enter Morton Arboretum for free. (Remember, the Children’s Garden is free with general admission.) If you are looking for discounts on Morton Arboretum, we suggest checking your local library as well. They might have a program you can use to get free or discounted tickets to Morton Arboretum. Our family has gotten tickets for everything from the Illinois Railway Museum to Brookfield Zoo Chicago.

DuPage county residents also get discounted tickets on Wednesdays, and several other groups also qualify for discounts throughout the year. You can find more information on this page and figure out if you qualify for a discount. Members get free general admission with the purchase of a membership, and some holidays are free for all guests. Finally, remember that purchasing your admission online in advance of your visit will also save you some money.

Thanks for reading this post on the Children’s Garden at Morton Arboretum.

The Children’s Garden is one small part of Morton Arboretum. We hope you will get a chance to explore more of this attraction’s 1,700 acres. We also hope you have found our guide to this little corner of Morton Arboretum helpful. For more guides to Chicagoland fun, please explore this section, which includes guides to popular attractions including Griffin Museum of Science and Industry, Shedd Aquarium, and Brookfield Zoo Chicago. We also share tips about lesser known attractions like Kline Creek Farm in West Chicago and the aforementioned Illinois Railway Museum. Thanks again for reading!