If you've never experienced a summer in Washington, DC, I would love to tell you about it.

It gets hot, like really hot, and very humid.

The city gets filled with men in seersucker suits who are pretending that the heat isn't getting to them.

Now, I've spent most of my life in DC.

I was gone for a few years and just came back.

And I feel confident in saying that summer can be one of the toughest parts of that living in the city.

But there is a place that I love that feels like an escape during the hot months.

It's this lush, green wonderland that sits on the east bank of the Enacostia River in the northeast edge of the city.

The Kennellworth Aquatic Gardens is a sanctuary.

There are dozens of ponds that are filled with all kinds of lilies and lotuses.

There are giant green leaves and strange seed pods sticking out of the water.

The deeper you go into the park, the easier it is to forget that you're in a city at all.

I like to sit by the water's edge and watch the dragonflies skim over the surface or bumblebees floating between the blossoms.

Sometimes you can see a turtle peek their head out through the lily pads.

There are places where the foliage gets so dense that it's hard to tell that there's water at all, which I learned the first time I came.

And I almost stepped straight into one of the ponds.

Now, at first, I loved these gardens because they were beautiful.

They were a nice place to go on a summer bike ride.

But then a few years ago, I learned how they actually came to be.

There's an incredible history that starts with a one armed civil war veteran who loved aquatic plants.

What started as this man's hobby eventually made him a fortune, but also saved the last tidal marsh in DC.

Walter B. Shaw was born on an island in Maine, somewhere where the landscape is made up of ponds and forests and wetlands,

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