Five Overlooked Gems at UVA

1. Music Library

With a collection of over 135,000 books, scores and sound recordings, and extensive online collections, including access to over 500,000 tracks of music, the Music Library has one of the most significant music collections in the southeastern United States and is a physical hub for music research in the digital age.

2. Morea Gardens

This small arboretum at the end of Sprigg Lane exhibits a collection of hollies and many native plants. The Kentucky coffee trees and Osage orange trees flourished for many years before the arboretum was created around them. A champion linden stands to the east of a house on the property.

3. Morven

Located on the back side of Carter Mountain, this nearly 3,000-acre property includes 43 buildings that were left by John Kluge to UVA as part of a larger donation of land. Those facilities include renowned formal gardens, a Japanese garden and teahouse constructed in the mid-1990s. The property hosts various meetings and events.

4. Anheuser Busch Coastal Research Center

Providing laboratory and housing facilities to researchers, faculty and students, the 42-acre ABCRC is located at the harbor of Oyster, Va. Buildings include 9,000 square feet of dry and wet labs, and there are several boats for researchers. The center is located within the larger Virginia Coast Reserve of the Nature Conservancy, which spans 35,000 acres and includes 14 barrier islands, lagoons, mudflats, tidal marshes and mainland watersheds extending 70 miles along the seaward margin of the Delmarva Peninsula.

5. Mountain Lake Biological Research Center

A full-service residential field station located nearly 4,000 feet up on a remote but easily accessible mountaintop in the southern Appalachians of southwest Virginia. Established in 1929 as a summer facility for teaching and research, the center is surrounded by sharp ecological gradients and fine-scale changes in habitat—ideal conditions for the studies of ecology and evolution.