Just Outside Milwaukee Is Wisconsin's Sprawling Park With Botanical Gardens, Trails, And Sporty Appeal

You could go from a manicured garden to a hike through woods to a golf course within a single park in Milwaukee's outer sprawl. Even in its home city of Franklin, a Milwaukee suburb that's known for being filled with parks, Whitnall Park stands out. That's in part because of its size: At 627 acres, it's just shy of a full square mile of parkland and the biggest of Milwaukee County's parks. All that space means the park can host the Boerner Botanical Gardens, Wehr Nature Center, miles of multi-use trails, a golf course, and lots of green space to picnic or play in.

Beyond its size, Whitnall Park holds some prestige for the features within its borders. Wehr Nature Center, a nature preserve made up of multiple habitats inside the park, won a 2025 National Association of Counties Achievement Award for its revamped public space design and access, per Milwaukee County. The preserve is the park's natural jewel, home to woodland, wetland, prairie, and oak savanna habitats that visitors can roam on trails. The Boerner Botanical Gardens has some national distinction, too — it's a Level II-accredited arboretum by ArbNet and is listed as the Great Lakes region's oldest nationally recognized public garden. Plus, the park is easy to reach from downtown Milwaukee if you have a car or rent one, at about a 25-minute drive away. You could come to explore its nationally distinguished nature-centered areas or just fill a day with golfing, cycling, or cross-country skiing.

One way to appreciate how much landscape Whitnall Park packs into its 600-plus acres is to walk through it. The most nature-focused trails are at the Wehr Nature Center, which has over 5 miles of trail routes, according to the center's website. If you want to get an especially varied hike, go for the 1-mile Grasslands Loop. It weaves between the woodland, oak savanna, and prairie habitats, then traces the edge of Mallard Lake. It does involve some stair-climbing but rewards with views of a waterfall and Wisconsin's native grasslands. The most accessible trail is the mile-long All Abilities Loop, following a hard-surface boardwalk and pier overlooking the lake. Along all the trails you'll find interpretive signs and observation decks, and past visitors have been especially impressed by the wildlife you can spot here. "The Wehr Nature Center is a true gem," a Google Maps reviewer observed. "Numerous species of birds, along with turtles, fish, sand cranes and more ..."

A slight downside to the Wehr Nature Center is that, while it's located inside the public, free-entry Whitnall Park, it does charge a small admission fee. There is, however, a free trail outside the nature center you can follow to tap into Milwaukee's reputation as America's most affordable lake destination. A section of the Oak Leaf Trail, a broader Milwaukee County trail network that partially follows Lake Michigan, cuts through Whitnall Park. The loop through the park is 3.5 miles, per Milwaukee County Parks, and paved throughout, making it suitable for cyclists, runners, and hikers alike. It runs past Boerner Botanical Gardens, picnic areas, and a playground, which could give you an easy way to combine stops at different parts of the park without repeatedly getting back in the car.

Within Whitnall Park, Boerner Botanical Gardens provides a distinctly more cultivated counterpart than the wilder landscapes at Wehr Nature Center. The garden is arranged as a series of specialized plantings, including rose, herb, peony, perennial, and bog gardens, per the Friends of Boerner Botanical Gardens. They have distinct flavors — the Rose Garden is deliberately ornamental, for example, while the Bog Walk leans into a more natural feel, with wild raspberries and jewelweeds bristling over the wooden walkway. The gardens admission charges a fee, though free admission days (as of summer 2026) are the fourth Monday of each month through August.

Whitnall also has plenty for visitors who want to fit a little more sporty activity into their park day. It contains an 18-hole golf course, making up a significant portion of the park space. The course gets good reviews, with 4.2 stars on Google Maps, as of this writing. Several reviewers made note of the course having some challenging, narrow greens. If you come in winter, the park makes a good add-on to Milwaukee's urban parks for sledding, skiing, and snowshoeing. Whitnall has a dedicated sledding hill, groomed cross-country ski trails, and routes to explore on snowshoes — you can rent snowshoes and skis at the park's clubhouse.