We’ve all leafed through calendars and children’s storybooks where soft-focused drawings of lush, Victorian gardens grow inside whitewashed picket fences; where barefoot children in pinafores dance down a woodland lane, posies in hand, oblivious to a world beyond the next grove of trees.

This bucolic world exists. It is the Edith J. Carrier Arboretum and Botanical Gardens located on the nearby James Madison University campus in Harrisonburg, Va., and it lures work-weary Washingtonians to step inside the pages of its real-life storybook for a day trip not soon to be forgotten.