It's easy to miss the short driveway into the Jensen Botanical Garden in Carmichael. Traffic on busy, bustling Fair Oaks Boulevard flies by with hardly a sideways glance. You have to look closely for the small wooden sign and the iron gate.
Make the turn, though, and you'll be spilled into a different world. Suddenly you're in a small dirt parking lot tucked among oaks and redwoods and a garden of uncommon beauty. In front of you, a garden paradise entices you to explore, to walk along the wide dirt paths and enjoy spring's crisp beauty.
A creeklike drainage ditch, lined with bright green tufts of white-flowering allium, meanders along one side of the parking lot. Choruses of croaking frogs almost drown out the hum of the road noise. Birds fill the trees with cacophonous chatter.
A slightly dilapidated covered wooden bridge, an Eagle Scout project from many years ago, lures you into the garden where thousands of daffodils grace a swale at the top of the garden. A thousand tulips, just beginning to bloom, carpet the ground beneath a towering, gnarled heritage oak. The deciduous magnolias, snow white and deep purple, are already open. There's tomato-red quince, bright yellow forsythia, lavender and purple violets hugging the ground, and glorious camellias, some so old they've grown into small trees.
The site was once home to Charles and Marguerite Jensen. The couple moved to the 3.5-acre site in 1958, and Charles Jensen vowed to turn the blackberry-choked property into a garden paradise. And he did. He planted 900 azaleas, 100 rhododendrons and 30 varieties of magnolia, as well as numerous dogwoods, Japanese maples, camellias and more.
