Cheekwood Botanical Garden and Museum of Art

Cheekwood Botanical Garden and Museum of Art is a 55-acre historic estate located on the western edge of Nashville, Tennessee. Centered on a 30,000-square-foot Georgian-style mansion, the site operates as a private botanical garden and art museum. Established in 1960, the institution integrates the historic Cheek family residence with formal gardens and curated art collections. It holds accreditation from the American Alliance of Museums and serves as a center for display, education, and study.

The estate originated from the wealth of the Cheek family. Christopher Cheek founded a wholesale grocery business in Nashville in the 1880s, and his son Leslie Cheek became president of the company by 1915. Leslie's cousin, Joel Owsley Cheek, developed an acclaimed coffee blend marketed through Nashville's Maxwell House Hotel, which famously President Theodore Roosevelt proclaimed was good to the last drop. The extended Cheek family were investors in the venture, and in 1928, the Postum Cereals Company, now General Foods, purchased the parent company, Cheek-Neal Coffee, for more than 40 million dollars. Using the proceeds, Leslie Cheek purchased 100 acres of woodland in West Nashville for a country estate. He hired New York residential and landscape architect Bryant Fleming, granting him full control over every detail from the landscape to the interior furnishings. The resulting limestone mansion and extensive formal gardens, inspired by 18th-century English manors, were completed in 1932. Leslie Cheek died just two years after moving in, but his wife Mabel and their daughter Huldah Cheek Sharp lived on the property until the 1950s. At that time, they offered the site for a botanical garden and art museum. Civic groups, including the Exchange Club of Nashville and the Horticultural Society of Middle Tennessee, led the redevelopment, aided by funds and permanent collections from the former Nashville Museum of Art. The new Cheekwood museum opened to the public in 1960.

Founded in 1959 upon the holdings of the former Nashville Museum of Art, the Cheekwood art collection encompasses broad categories of American art, American and British decorative arts, and contemporary art. The American art collection includes 600 paintings and 5,000 prints, drawings, and photographs, assembled largely in the 1980s and early 1990s through a multimillion-dollar bequest. The decorative arts holdings feature a 650-piece silver collection spanning the 18th to 20th centuries, alongside the third-largest collection of Worcester porcelain in the United States. The contemporary art collection, though small, is focused on high-quality works and outdoor sculpture acquired for the woodland trail.

The American art collection has a particular strength centered on The Eight. It also holds the world's largest collection of sculptures by William Edmondson, photographs by Louise Dahl-Wolfe, and a wide variety of post-Second World War prints. Recent focused acquisitions have added paintings by James Hamilton and William Bradford. The contemporary art collection, housed in galleries created from the original garage and stables, includes paintings by Larry Rivers, Andy Warhol, Robert Ryman, Red Grooms, and Marylyn Dintenfass. Seven small galleries built into the former horse stable stalls allow for the display of installation art. The Ann and Monroe Carell Jr. Family Sculpture Trail, also referred to as the Carrell Woodland Sculpture Trail, extends the contemporary collection into nature with ten to fifteen sculptures by international artists. The Cheek Mansion itself is considered part of the collection, notably featuring illusionist murals that line the main corridor.

The 55-acre site encompasses the botanical garden, which surrounds the museum. The gardens feature a diverse range of plant collections, including boxwood, conifer, crape myrtle, daffodil, daylily, dogwood, fern, herb, holly, hosta, hydrangea, Japanese maple, magnolia, Southeastern United States natives, redbud, and trillium. Visitors encounter varied garden styles, such as the Robertson Ellis Color Garden with its sweeping colorful flower curves, the Martin Boxwood Garden designed by Bryant Fleming in the late 1920s with terraced plantings, the Japanese Garden, the Wills Perennial Garden, and the Burr Terrace Garden. The Howe Wildflower Garden, originally located at Cora Howe's East Nashville home, was transferred to Cheekwood in 1968 along with its tool shed and stone wall. A year-long renovation of the mansion completed in June 2017 restored authentic features, including wood and marble floors that had been carpeted, and conserved historical architectural motifs.

Cheekwood is located at 1200 Forest Park Drive in Nashville, Davidson County, Tennessee. It is open daily with an admission fee. The site operates two gift shops and a restaurant called the Cafe 1929, which is located in the Frist Learning Center. Since 1963, the institution benefited from the Swan Ball, a fundraiser established by Jane Andreson Dudley. However, in July 2024, a legal dispute arose when the SB Initiative, a group of former Swan Ball committee members, sued Cheekwood, claiming the institution orchestrated a takeover of the event's assets. Cheekwood filed a counterclaim asserting ownership of the Swan Ball trademark. The lawsuit was resolved with an agreement that the Swan Ball Committee, formally incorporated as SB Initiative, owned the trademark. Consequently, the Swan Ball organizers moved the 2025 event to Edwin Warner Park, which became the new beneficiary.