Visiting the Denver Botanic Gardens Lavender Festival in 2024

The Lavender Festival is held by the Denver Botanic Gardens at their Chatfield Farms location every July. In addition to a moderately sized field of lavender plants, you'll find live music, food trucks, food and craft vendors, a butterfly garden, and some activities. This was our second year attending and it was not a bad way at all to spend a Saturday morning.

Getting Tickets and Getting There

The Lavender Festival is a special ticketed event. Although it's not as busy as some of the other garden events like the pumpkin patch weekend or the "Blossoms of Light" Christmas lights in the main York Street Denver gardens, I still recommend buying your tickets as soon as they're available. We like to purchase the early 9am time slot so that we can get a good parking spot (in an adjacent field) and get there before it gets too busy.

The festival takes place at the Chatfield Farms offshoot of the Denver Botanic Gardens about 20 miles southwest of Denver. There are no public transit options available for getting directly to here so be prepared to either drive, take rideshare, or some combination of RTD and rideshare.

Activities

We enjoy going to Chatfield Farms in general – mostly just to walk around and check out the wildflower gardens, CSA farm, butterfly exhibit, and to let our daughter look at the farm animals. During the Lavender Festival you can still do all of these things, but also quite a bit more.

There's a market where you can buy lavender and lavender accessories (+ a whole lot of other local arts and crafts).

There is live music too. We listened to a few songs from a local folk band called Before the Sun. They were pretty good, but what put them over the top for me was their cover of Secret Tunnel from Avatar the Last Airbender. We were eating lunch and I happened to hear it in the distance... almost couldn't believe it! 😂

There were also barrel train rides and wagon rides. We didn't want to take our 11-month old on those this time, but will definitely consider it in the future!

We checked out the dye gardens which aren't normally open. Checked out the CSA (Community Supported Agriculture) farm. And even looked at a tiny horse. Overall a good time.

Food

Although you can totally bring your own food and drinks, I'm a sucker for food trucks so we went with that. They had four or five decent options available, but we decided to go with the cheese truck: Cheese Love Grill.

I got a traditional Philly cheesesteak and Jessica got a "Colorado" cheesesteak. Basically a Philly, but with a ton of green chili sauce slathered on top. Our daughter ate Cheerios.

Very good. 😋

Tips

My main advice for attending the Lavender Festival is to be prepared to walk. You park in a grassy field thats fairly rugged and the market and entertainment takes place in a large grassy field. The garden itself is about 50-50 sidewalk and fine gravel. If you have small kids and are planning on bringing a stroller, make sure you bring a wagon or rugged stroller. We brought our Thule Chariot Lite this time and it handled it like a champ.

Remember this is Colorado in July so definitely bring some water bottles and sun protection as well. Chatfield Farms normally has plenty of shade, but since much of this event is out in the fields you won't necessarily get to enjoy it. I recommend arriving in the morning before it gets too hot and wearing sun-protective clothing.

Final Takeaways

This was our second time attending the Lavender Festival and I hope to make next year our third. Definitely recommended if you're in the Denver area and looking for something to do in late July. 🌞