Kenilworth Aquatic Gardens

DC was built on a marsh, a beautiful, brackish, low-lying ripple of sawgrass and steel-blue water, wind-coaxed and tide touched by the inflow of the Potomac from the Chesapeake Bay. You’d never know all that now, of course, unless you come to the only national park in the USA devoted to water plants. The aquatic gardens were begun as the hobby of a Civil War veteran and operated for 56 years as a commercial water garden, until the federal government purchased them in 1938. Today this is the only place in the city to see the natural wetlands the District sprang from; look out for beaver dams, clouds of birds and the more traditional manicured grounds, quilted in water lilies and lotus.