The Short Hills Walk That Costs Nothing, Even When Greenwood Gardens Is Closed

Walk up to the gates at 274 Old Short Hills Road on a Tuesday afternoon and you'll find them shut. Greenwood Gardens, the 28-acre former estate that most guides to Short Hills treat as the town's signature green space, only opens its gates three days a week. For the other four, the terraces, grottoes, and Arts and Crafts follies that made this property famous sit behind a locked entrance, visible only if you know where else to look.

Most residents don't. They plan a Saturday visit, pay the admission, and never realize that the exact same hillside the gardens sit on has a public side that never closes.

The Three-Day Gate

Greenwood is open for the 2026 season from May 1 through November 8, Fridays, Saturdays and Sundays, from 10 am to 5 pm, with the last entry at 3:30 pm. That means as of this August, the gardens are mid-season, but still only reachable on the back half of the week. Adults pay $15, seniors and students with ID pay $10, and children 3 to 12 pay $5. Strollers aren't permitted on the historic paths because of uneven terrain and stairways, though stroller parking is available on the East Terrace.

None of that is a knock on the place. The 28-acre public garden was once a private estate, and it still gives visitors winding stone paths, fountains, and garden structures that feel both timeless and inviting. It's the kind of stop worth planning a weekend around. But if your free time lands on a Monday evening or a Wednesday lunch break, the ticket booth isn't the point of entry you're looking for.

The Fence Line Has a Public Side

Here's what most visitors to Greenwood never realize: the hillside directly outside its boundary is public parkland, open every day, at no cost. Park in the Old Short Hills Park car park, and going clockwise, you join the West Ridge trail, unblazed, keeping the grounds of Greenwood Gardens to your left, before turning after about 1.1 miles onto the Elmdale trail. You are, for a real stretch of that walk, tracing the same ridge the gardens occupy, just on the other side of a property line, with no gate and no season to work around.

This corner of the property sits inside South Mountain Reservation, which is considerably larger than any single garden or arboretum in the area. The reservation covers 2,110 acres and is located in central portions of Maplewood, Millburn, and West Orange, bordering South Orange, between the first and second ridges of the Watchung Mountains. The section that touches Old Short Hills Park is a small, walkable slice of that larger system, but it's the slice that happens to run alongside the town's most photographed private garden.

Where the Trail Leads Next

Keep walking, or drive the short distance instead, and you land at a different kind of green space entirely: the Cora Hartshorn Arboretum and Bird Sanctuary at 324 Forest Drive South. This 16.5-acre arboretum and bird sanctuary is located in the Short Hills section of Millburn, and its trails are open to the public from dawn to dusk without charge. No season restriction, no ticket window, no last-entry cutoff. If Greenwood is closed and the West Ridge trail has run its course, this is where the day continues.

The land was gifted to Cora Hartshorn in 1923 by her father on undeveloped woodland of oaks, tulip trees, dogwood, and beech, and she designed a system of roads and walking paths that grew to three miles by 1938. The arboretum contains 45 species of trees, including 275-year-old tulip trees, over 150 species of wildflowers, and represents a critical habitat for plants and wildlife. One visitor summed up the appeal simply: "A great place to visit if you live in town or are driving through (or a short walk from the Short Hills Train Station)."

The arboretum also runs a calendar that gives residents a reason to come back more than once a season, including an annual overnight Fall Family Campout where families pitch a tent on the grounds, and a Cornhole Throw Down fundraiser held each fall at Boxcar Bar & Grill, the restaurant this walk eventually leads to.

Here's how the three stops actually compare, side by side, for anyone trying to plan around them:

The pattern is hard to miss once you see it laid out. Two of the three stops on this walk don't care what day it is.

The Depot That Never Stopped Selling Tickets

The walk has a natural endpoint, and it happens to be a working piece of railroad history. Boxcar Bar & Grill sits inside the Short Hills train station at 25 Chatham Road. Originally, the space was the ticket building for the railroad stop, and it remains that today. Commuters still use the ticket windows, and trains stop a few feet from the tables to pick up and drop off passengers. The current restaurant concept was established in May 2020, built inside a building the town has leased out for more than a decade to keep a neighborhood bar and grill running alongside an active platform.

The oddity that makes this stop worth mentioning isn't the food, it's the layout. The ticket window is actually inside the restaurant. You can order dinner a few feet from where a commuter is buying a ticket for the next inbound train. One longtime patron put the whole arrangement this way: "The trains come and go, but Boxcar Bar and Grill has been here since 2012."

The Arboretum and the depot aren't unconnected either. The Arboretum's annual Cornhole Throw Down fundraiser is held at Boxcar, with proceeds going toward forest restoration efforts in Short Hills. The trail, the woodland sanctuary, and the depot bar aren't three separate destinations pulled together for a guide. They already function as a loop, supporting each other, a short walk apart.

What This Actually Tells You About Short Hills

None of this changes what Short Hills is known for: the schools, the train service into Manhattan, the tree-lined streets. But it says something about how the town actually works day to day. The most talked-about green space here operates on a three-day schedule and a ticket line, while the free alternative sitting on its border, plus a woodland sanctuary a short walk beyond it, are open every single day of the year at no cost. Most people who move here find out about Greenwood Gardens first, because it's the one with the website and the admission fee and the write-ups. The free trail along its fence line, and the arboretum it leads to, are the parts of the neighborhood you tend to learn about only after you've lived here a while, or from someone who has.

That's the kind of detail that separates a resident's mental map of a town from a visitor's. If you're weighing a move to Short Hills, or you already call it home and want a market read as detailed as the trail map, the team at Allison Ziefert Homes can walk you through both. Get a Free Local Market Consultation whenever you're ready.