Delaware Canal Towpath · Lambertville, New Jersey
Every plant
along this path
has a story.
A guided botanical walk through one of the most ecologically rich corridors in the Delaware Valley, led by a Master Herbalist and Historical Horticulturist who has spent over a decade reading this landscape.
Book Through Airbnb
The canal walk is offered as a verified Airbnb Experience, which means travelers visiting the Delaware Valley can discover and book it directly through the Airbnb platform alongside their accommodation. It also means that local guests who prefer the convenience and trust of Airbnb's booking system can reserve with equal ease.
Global Discovery
Airbnb Experiences reaches travelers from around the world who are actively searching for meaningful, place-based activities in the destinations they visit. Lambertville and New Hope draw a remarkably well-traveled, culturally curious visitor, exactly the audience for this walk.
Verified Host, Established Reputation
Anna is an experienced Airbnb host with a five-star record at Haere Mai Canal Cottage, situated right on the towpath. Her Experiences listing benefits from that existing trust and review history on the platform.
Flexible Scheduling
The Airbnb listing offers scheduled public dates throughout the season. Private groups and garden clubs who prefer a custom date are encouraged to inquire directly for a tailored booking.
✦ Airbnb Experience · Lambertville, NJ
Reading the Canal Path: A Botanical Walk with a Master Herbalist
Join Anna Davis, Master Herbalist and Historical Horticulturist, for an intimate guided walk along the Delaware Canal Towpath. In two hours, you will encounter native plants, colonial-era introductions, and invasive species, each one illuminated by science, history, and genuine personal knowledge of this landscape. Maximum six guests. No botanical background required.
$45 per person View on Airbnb →Update this link with your live Airbnb Experience URL
What This Walk Is
Not a nature walk.
A living lecture.
The Delaware Canal Towpath is not simply a scenic corridor. It is a palimpsest of ecological history, layered with native species that were here long before European settlement, plants that arrived with the canal boats of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, and aggressive invaders that arrived more recently and continue to reshape what we see today.
Anna Davis has walked this path thousands of times, and she has never stopped noticing. She will point out the spicebush you passed without seeing. She will name the weedy vine strangling the willow and explain precisely why it is a problem. She will tell you what the elderberry meant to the people who lived here two centuries ago, and what a contemporary herbalist does with it now.
These are small-group, unhurried, deeply informed walks. Guests leave with a richer relationship to a landscape they thought they already knew.
Explore Tour Types
Tour Offerings
Choose Your Walk
All tours depart from a Lambertville meeting point and follow a selected stretch of the Delaware Canal Towpath. Group size is intentionally kept small to allow genuine conversation and close observation.
Signature Walk · 2 Hours
Reading the Canal Path
The foundational walk. Anna leads guests through a curated mile of towpath, identifying native plants, colonial-era introductions, and invasive species, weaving ecological science with local history and personal anecdote. Appropriate for all levels of botanical interest.
Flat, accessible terrain · Comfortable walking shoes required
Deep Dive · 3 Hours
Natives, Invaders & Colonials
A more extended walk that gives full attention to all three botanical categories Anna knows best: the native flora that shaped this region's ecology, the plants that arrived with European settlers and have naturalized over centuries, and the modern invasives that demand our attention. Suited to garden club members, naturalists, and the genuinely curious.
Illustrated plant reference card included
Medicinal Focus · 2.5 Hours
The Herbalist's Eye
Anna brings her Master of Science in Herbal Medicine to bear on the canal corridor, focusing the walk on plants with medicinal, culinary, and craft traditions. Guests learn how to see a landscape through an herbalist's lens and leave with a new vocabulary for the plants they encounter every day. Optional add-on: a small-batch herbal preparation to take home.
Optional herbal take-home: +$15 per person
Private & Custom · Flexible
Private Group & Custom Tours
Garden clubs, naturalist societies, family reunions, corporate retreats, and school groups are warmly welcome. Anna will design a walk around your group's specific interests, whether that is invasive species management, colonial plant history, medicinal botany, or simply a beautifully narrated introduction to the natural world. Longer or multi-stop tours available on request.
Custom itinerary & add-ons available
What You Will Encounter
Four Lenses on
a Living Landscape
Anna does not simply name plants. She places each one within a web of ecological, historical, and cultural meaning that transforms a familiar path into somewhere entirely new.
Native Flora
The plants that belong here, that shaped the watershed's ecology, that fed and healed the people who have lived along this river for thousands of years. Anna knows their stories and their science with equal fluency.
Colonial & Historical Introductions
Plants that arrived in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, many deliberately, carried by settlers who needed familiar food, medicine, and fiber. Some have naturalized beautifully. Others tell a more complicated story.
Invasive Species
The corridor faces real ecological pressure from invasive plants, and Anna does not look away from that. She names them, explains their impacts, and helps guests understand what responsible stewardship of a landscape like this requires.
Anecdote & Living Memory
After years of walking this precise path and over a decade interpreting historic gardens professionally, Anna carries stories that no field guide contains. A plant anecdote, well told, is a plant remembered.
The Route
The Delaware Canal Towpath at Lambertville
The Delaware Canal State Park is one of the last remaining intact canal systems from the early American industrial era, and the towpath that runs alongside it is also one of the most botanically rich linear corridors in New Jersey and Pennsylvania. It connects wetland edges, upland forest margins, old orchard remnants, and disturbed canal banks, each microhabitat home to a distinct plant community.
Anna's walks are calibrated to the season. Spring brings the early ephemerals and the flush of spicebush and elderberry. Summer reveals the full drama of the invasive corridor alongside the native jewel-weed and cardinal flower. Autumn is rich with seed heads, late asters, and the fiery color of native shrubs. Tours are offered from early spring through late fall.
All walks depart from a central Lambertville meeting point. Exact location provided upon booking.
Notable Botanical Stops
The Spicebush Understory
Lindera benzoin, one of the earliest native shrubs to bloom in spring, and a key food source for migratory birds. Anna traces its medicinal and culinary history from Indigenous use through the colonial kitchen.
The Jewel-weed Corridor
Impatiens capensis in summer abundance, growing beside the very poison ivy its juice traditionally soothes. Native, beautiful, and practically useful.
The Elderberry Margin
Sambucus canadensis at the water's edge, a plant with a remarkably long history of human use in this exact region, and one Anna knows intimately from both an herbal and a historical standpoint.
The Invasive Corridor
Where Ailanthus, Lythrum, Celastrus, and others demonstrate what ecological disruption looks like in real time. A necessary and fascinating stop.
The Cardinal Flower Reach
In late summer, Lobelia cardinalis lines the water's edge in extraordinary crimson, a plant beloved by hummingbirds and one of the most photographed plants on the entire canal system.
Your Guide
Anna Davis
Anna Davis is the founder of A Garden in Thyme Consulting LLC, a botanical education and consulting practice rooted in the history, ecology, and medicinal traditions of plants. She holds a Master of Science in Herbal Medicine from Tai Sophia Institute, and she spent over eleven years as a Historical Horticulturist at Washington Crossing Historic Park, interpreting eighteenth-century plant life and garden practice for diverse audiences.
She is a Harrison Fellow of the Historic Landscape Institute at the University of Virginia and Monticello, a distinction that reflects both her scholarly depth and her commitment to the living history of landscapes.
Anna lives on the canal path in Lambertville. She walks it in every season, in all weathers, with the eye of a trained botanist and the attentiveness of someone who genuinely loves this particular corridor of the world. Her canal tours are not a program designed for general audiences. They are the natural overflow of a specific, long-cultivated expertise.
- M.S. Herbal Medicine, Tai Sophia Institute
- 11+ years, Historical Horticulturist, Washington Crossing Historic Park
- Harrison Fellow, Historic Landscape Institute, University of Virginia & Monticello
- Founder, A Garden in Thyme Consulting LLC
- Specialist in 18th-century plants, colonial garden history, and medicinal botany
What Guests Say
In Their Words
"I have walked that towpath a hundred times and never truly seen it. Anna changed that entirely. I could not stop talking about the walk for days afterward."Garden Club Member, New Hope, PA
"Her knowledge is extraordinary, but it is the way she tells the stories that makes the difference. Every plant became a character. We did not want to stop walking."Private Group Guest, Princeton, NJ
"We brought our naturalist society on the Natives, Invaders and Colonials walk and it exceeded every expectation. Rigorous, engaging, and genuinely moving."Naturalist Society, Bucks County, PA
Reserve Your Place
Two Ways to Book
Join a scheduled public walk through Airbnb, or reach out directly to arrange a private group tour, garden club visit, or custom itinerary.
Private groups, garden clubs & custom tours by direct inquiry · Gift certificates available upon request
Stay on the Path
Haere Mai Canal Cottage
Anna's five-star Airbnb, Haere Mai Canal Cottage, is located right on the Delaware Canal Towpath in Lambertville. Open to guests during fall and winter, it places visitors directly on the path Anna has been reading for years, stepping from the cottage door onto the towpath itself.
A fall or winter stay at the cottage paired with a botanical canal walk is one of the more singular experiences the Delaware Valley offers. The canal corridor in autumn is richly colored and seed-head laden; in winter, the bare structure of the plant community becomes visible in ways that the leafy seasons conceal. Anna reads both seasons with equal depth.
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