Before any of the European names attached themselves to this land, the Powhatan called it Oughnum and used it as a hunting ground — the rolling country north of the falls where the James River breaks the Piedmont. Patrick Henry, the Virginia orator and revolutionary governor, later owned this tract. By the time Lewis Ginter showed up in 1884, the land was a quiet rural property suitable for the new sport of bicycling. Ginter was an extraordinary figure even by Gilded Age standards. Born in New York in 1824, he made fortunes in dry goods, banking, and then tobacco — pioneering the modern cigarette industry in the post-Civil War years. By the 1890s he was Richmond's wealthiest citizen, building the lavish Jefferson Hotel downtown and the planned community of Ginter Park. The Lakeside Wheel Club was a small piece of his portfolio. After his death the property passed to his niece Grace Arents.

Grace Arents was a philanthropist with a particular focus on children's health. In 1912 she remodeled and expanded the abandoned cycling club cottage into the Lakeside Sanatorium for Babies, a children's convalescent hospital for infants suffering from tuberculosis, malnutrition, and the other illnesses of urban poverty in the early twentieth century. The sanatorium operated for two years. In 1914, Arents converted the building into her own residence and moved in with her companion Mary Garland Smith. She renamed it Bloemendaal House — "valley of flowers" — honoring the family's Dutch heritage. Over the following decades, Arents and Smith expanded the property by purchasing adjacent tracts, bringing the total acreage to about 73 acres. They cultivated extensive gardens around the house. When Arents died, she left the property to be developed into a botanical garden in honor of her uncle Lewis Ginter — the bequest that gave the garden its name.

The garden as a public institution effectively began in 1984, though its current form emerged from a $41 million capital campaign completed in 2004. The campaign built the major facilities you see today: the Robins Visitors Center (1999), the Massey Greenhouses (1999), the Education and Library Complex (2002), the classical glass-domed Conservatory (2003), and the Children's Garden (2005). The Conservatory is the visual signature — a Victorian-style glass dome rising over its tropical collection, especially striking when lit against winter darkness. The garden today covers fifty acres with more than a dozen themed gardens, ranging from the Sunken Garden to the Cherry Tree Walk to a meticulously planted Rose Garden. A library, a café, and the historic Bloemendaal House anchor the visitor experience. Virginia Commonwealth University houses its herbarium at the garden — a working collection used by the Flora of Virginia project to compile a modern state flora published by the University of Virginia Press.

Each winter the garden hosts Dominion Energy GardenFest of Lights — an after-hours holiday display that draws thousands of visitors from across the region. The trees and paths fill with hundreds of thousands of bulbs, the Conservatory lights up like a green-glass jewel, and the garden becomes one of the largest illuminated holiday displays in the mid-Atlantic. In spring, summer, and early fall, the Conservatory hosts the Butterflies LIVE! exhibit — hundreds of live tropical butterflies released into the warm domed space, drinking from feeders and landing on visitors. Spring brings concerts, Easter activities, and the cherry blossoms; summer brings outdoor concerts; fall brings the colors of an oak-and-maple Piedmont landscape. The garden has been a Shorty Award winner for its digital presence.

The garden is more than a display space. In partnership with Virginia Tech and the Virginia Nurserymen and Landscape Association, Lewis Ginter runs a Plant Introduction Program that selects, tests, propagates, and distributes ornamental plant species suited to Virginia growing conditions. Plants that perform well here move into the regional nursery trade. The Flora of Virginia project, working through the herbarium, is documenting the state's full plant diversity in a single comprehensive reference. The garden offers extensive adult education programs, K-12 educational programs, and select free admission days each year (typically July 4 and Labor Day). What started as a tobacco baron's cycling club, became a Depression-era baby sanatorium, became Grace Arents's home, has grown into something that takes plants seriously — as objects of beauty, of science, and of public good.