Chicago Botanic Garden: Visit a City in a Garden

If you’ve ever seen Chicago’s official city seal, you might have noticed a Latin phrase in a banner along the bottom. "Urbs in Horto," the motto for the city, translates to "City in a Garden," and represents the commitment to green spaces that Chicago has maintained since its incorporation in 1837—long before we scientifically understood the importance and impact that this greenery has on urban environments and our greater ecosystem. This motto was also established over 100 years before the idea to build a public botanical garden in the Chicago area got real momentum.

This motto had a more utilitarian translation in the early days of the city—the swamps, barren sand dunes and sparsely settled prairies needed to be planted with crops for food and trees for lumber—but the more modern interpretation of the phrase began taking shape when the Chicago Horticultural Society was founded in 1890. After the Great Chicago Fire of 1871, the city needed to be rebuilt, and that included landscaping. What has become known as The Great Rebuilding reshaped the city with new parks, the first forest preserves and radiating, tree-lined avenues rather than the homogeneous city grid that existed before.

The creation of the Chicago Horticultural Society was an integral part of this process, and the society was quickly put to work organizing and hosting flower and horticultural shows in the city. With just two successful shows under their belt, the society was given the monumental task of hosting the World’s Columbian Exposition Chrysanthemum Show world’s fair in 1893. The horticultural elements in and around the White City put Chicago on the map and upheld its “Urbs in Horto” motto.

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After a period of inactivity during World War I and the Great Depression, the Chicago Horticultural Society was reinvigorated by the victory gardens that gained popularity during World War II. Volunteers across the city and in neighboring suburbs came together to teach thousands of families about horticulture and gardening, which resulted in one of the most successful networks of victory gardens in the nation. With this momentum of gardening well underway, leaders of the horticulture society officially reinstated the group in 1945. A garden center was established for classes and exhibitions at the old Chicago Public Library, but it wasn’t long before the need for a large-scale, permanent public garden was evident.

In 1962, the society agreed to work with the Forest Preserves of Cook County to manage and create this new public garden in an area called the Skokie Marsh, and on September 25, 1965, they broke ground for the Chicago Botanic Garden. The renowned landscape architecture firm of Simonds and Simonds was commissioned to create a master plan for the new gardens, which took inspiration from the eighteenth-century Chinese imperial gardens of present-day Beijing. When Chicago Botanic Garden opened its doors in 1972, it consisted of only a small greenhouse, one outdoor garden area, and around 30 staff. The internationally recognized botanical institution that we know today was just getting started.

From its inception, Chicago Botanic Garden enlisted some of the best and brightest architects to craft their living museum. Under the mission statement “We cultivate the power of plants to sustain and enrich life,” the garden centered education and state-of-the-art ideas in its additions and endeavors. Edward Larrabee Barnes, who championed simplicity and site sensitivity in design, designed the Regenstein Education Center in 1976. Dr. Koichi Kawana, who was a pioneer of using an area’s native plants in traditional Japanese garden designs, designed the Elizabeth Hubert Malott Japanese Garden in 1975. One of the most influential garden designers of the late twentieth century, John Brookes, MBE, designed the Helen and Richard Thomas English Walled Garden in 1991. A more recent addition, the Plant Science Center, was designed by Booth Hansen, a leading architecture firm in Chicago.

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As a living museum, Chicago Botanic Garden strives to collect and maintain a wide array of plants that includes trees, shrubs, vines, hardy perennials and tropical plants. Currently, that equates to a total of more than 14,000 taxa, with over 2.4 million perennial plants and propagules alone. With such massive and wide-ranging collections, it can be hard to pick out just a handful of plants that are “signature” to this institution. However, Chicago Botanic Garden is also a Plant Collections Network (PCN) member, which means they have agreed to put extra initiative behind conserving specific plant populations, and four genera at the garden are nationally accredited collections in this network.

Chicago Botanic Garden takes special care in selecting and cultivating plants that thrive in their Midwest climate, which always includes species that are native to the region. One of those marvelous natives is Baptisia, or false indigo. With about 56 individual taxa represented by more than 2,000 plants on display, you will encounter a wide range of blue, purple, yellow and white blooms if you visit the gardens in spring or early summer. Some particularly eye-catching specimens to keep an eye out for are the cultivars bred by Jim Ault in the Chicagoland Grows® breeding program: Baptisia x variicolor ‘Twilite’ (pictured above) and Baptisia ‘Lunar Eclipse’.

You won’t need to go out of your way to enjoy a sampling of the garden’s hardy geranium collection. Naturally occurring on every continent except Antarctica, this is a wide-ranging genus, and Chicago Botanic Garden has the largest number of Geranium taxa in the United States (160 identified/known taxa, which includes 118 different cultivars). You can catch their blue, purple, pink and white flowers in bloom from May to October and in both sunny and shady spots in the garden. Geraniums are also one of the many plants that have gone through testing in the garden’s plant trials, with more than 180 varieties evaluated over the years (check out the results of these trials published by Fine Gardening magazine: "The Best of the Best Geraniums").

Like the other plants on this list, spireas were selected as a specialty collection for their adaptability to the soils and climate of the Midwest while being drought-tolerant and low-maintenance. The compact size and multi-season interest of these shrubs also makes them excellent selections for both suburban and urban gardens, and easy to incorporate into many different areas at Chicago Botanic Garden. Visit in the late spring or summer to enjoy these shrubs covered in white and pink blooms or plan your trip for fall to see their wide range of fall foliage color. The garden’s current collection consists of 27 species and 49 cultivars, but they are continually working to expand the collection and increase its diversity.

The last category of plants in one we have determined to be “signature” to many botanical gardens in the United States: oak trees. As one of the most iconic and essential native plants found across North America, it is no surprise that so many botanical institutions strive to conserve and celebrate these garden behemoths. Chicago Botanic Garden is currently home to 81 taxa of Quercus, but it is impossible to support a complete collection of oaks in any one garden. So, in 2007, the garden took part in establishing a multi-institutional Quercus collection with 20 institutions across the country, including the Missouri Botanical Garden and the Denver Botanic Gardens. These majestic trees are stunning to witness any time of year, even when their large crowns are bare in winter, but plan a visit in fall for their most vibrant display.

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