By Jay Pridmore

The Chicago Botanic Garden broke ground in 1965 with an unlikely site but a rich heritage and a powerful ambition to make a mark on the gardens and landscapes of the Chicago area. The Garden’s organizational success was swift, and the splendors of the physical site developed more quickly than most observers believed possible. Today, the Chicago Botanic Garden counts among the nation’s leading institutions dedicated to horticulture and plant research.

The astonishing growth of the Chicago Botanic Garden is the result of successful work on many levels, including striking seasonal displays, wide-ranging scientific work and extensive plant collections — all sited and housed in what has evolved as a grand laboratory of landscape architecture. Now more than ever, the importance of landscape and garden design at the Chicago Botanic Garden is being highlighted and appreciated because of several new projects by designers of international stature.

World-class design at the Chicago Botanic Garden is nothing new. From its founding, the Garden has hired leading architects and has inspired influential designs, beginning with the master plan and early gardens by John O. Simonds and Geoffrey Rausch. In the decades since its creation, the Garden’s design has grown continuously in grandeur and reputation. Now, its pedigree is being validated again with major new projects that elaborate on early principles and in some cases redefine new concepts in contemporary garden design. Recent projects include:

• The Great Basin — a major new work by Oehme, van Sweden & Associates. Featuring lush masses of herbaceous perennials and one of the most extensive water gardens, this project represents an outstanding example of the New American Garden style pioneered by Wolfgang Oehme and James van Sweden.
  
  
• The Botanic Garden Center — a building designed by Edward Larrabee Barnes, Chicago and landscape by the Office of Dan Kiley. Working within the context of the Garden’s early plan to harmonize buildings and landscape, the project represents an exacting distillation of 20^th-century design from the studios of two recognized masters.
  
  
• Spider Island — by Michael Van Valkenburgh. The Chicago Botanic Garden’s smallest island has been carefully sculpted and planted to create a succession of sensations that magnify the overall effect of the Garden’s lakes.

While each of these projects stands to make a distinctive mark on the American

landscape design of this period, all of them work harmoniously within the master plan and substantiate the foresight and integrity of Mr. Simonds’ and Mr. Rausch’s earliest work in creating what was then an entirely new garden.

"These new projects are marvelous works by leading designers," said Kris Jarantoski, the Garden’s Executive Vice President and Director. "They also adhere to a vocabulary and plan that enables each new project to contribute to an overall aesthetic and sensibility."

The success of the Chicago Botanic Garden has garnered the institution record rewards in visitor attendance and membership, and has built for it a worldwide reputation. On another level, its success represents a model strategy for the ongoing growth and development of major public gardens. At the Chicago Botanic Garden, this approach involves many factors, including:

• The Chicago Horticultural Society’s creation of an early site plan and design, which foresaw growth in research, collections and education, as well as in public display.
• A master plan inspired by the natural setting and not conventional gardening models.
• An administration, staff and donor group whose vision adheres to the master plan, but whose sensibility remains innovative and contemporary.
• Leading designers whose high level of creativity is blended with respect for the nature of the site and existing conditions.

Now with the opening of three new gardens and the Botanic Garden Center, the Chicago Botanic Garden represents the state-of-the-art in landscape architecture, most emphatically in Oehme, van Sweden’s "New American Garden" style, a contemporary movement marked by informality, eclecticism and constant change.

The growing reputation of the Chicago Botanic Garden represents an affirmation of the institution’s original vision and adherence to a comprehensive master plan. This process began in 1963 when the Garden’s original organizers, including trustees of the Chicago Horticultural Society, engaged John O. Simonds, one of the nation’s leading landscape architects of the time, to imagine and plan a great public garden located on a neglected corner of land belonging to the Forest Preserve District of Cook County. Mr. Simonds later described the Chicago Botanic Garden’s creation as a "story of transformation. … A whole new landscape of hills, streams, lakes and islands was shaped from depleted fields and grossly polluted drainage ways."

The Garden became a prime example of John O. Simonds’ approach to creating environments that live, breathe and serve the needs of mankind — in this case reclaiming polluted wetlands and gravel pits left from the recent construction of a nearby expressway.

Along with his young associate Geoffrey Rausch, Mr. Simonds studied the strengths of the site, including a native woodland on the east side of the property, a branch of the Chicago River that was later channeled on the west, and a system of naturalized lakes on the south border. These existing conditions inspired an overall scheme for the Chicago Botanic Garden: a winding chain of lakes, nine islands suitable for separate garden projects, and an overall "sense of place" within a setting of woodlands, savannas and wetlands that characterize the Chicago area’s natural environment.

Beyond these intensely local roots, the master plan was guided by broader influences of classic landscape design. Among the Botanic Garden’s most important features was its continuous series of long vistas punctuated by places of surprising and peaceful intimacy, a technique used in many traditional gardens. Here, the objective was to create a splendid variety of garden experiences in relatively limited space. Or as Simonds put it, the design "distilled" many different features of the Midwestern landscape "in microcosm (enclosures) and macrocosm (distant views) — to convey the same sensory or intellectual impact as the generic model."

The Simonds-Rausch plan specified the broad outlines of the Chicago Botanic Garden and called for the immediate creation of its main topographical features. The master plan also indicated that individual gardens could be created over time, and by various designers.

"It is to be noted," stated a Chicago Botanic Garden memo at the time, "that the plan at this stage has not been carried into detail. Rather, it has intentionally been kept diagrammatic and flexible — a study in relationships."

The genius of this master plan was that it enabled the Chicago Botanic Garden to embark on several different missions from the outset. On one hand, the master plan envisioned seasonal displays in the tradition of great private gardens built in the early 20^th century. On the other hand, the Garden was to act as a scientific institution, engaged in the collection and experimentation of plant material. Moreover, the Chicago Botanic Garden would be a museum dedicated to exhibits of landscape technique, scientific education and conservation.

To achieve all this and more required synthesis, reassessment and patient effort. While Board President William A. P. Pullman acknowledged that the master plan would require decades to realize, ideas for appropriate new gardens were proposed and some quickly took shape. Among the first were the Home Landscape Demonstration Gardens, fundamentally inspired by the private garden of Mrs. Edith Farwell, a master gardener and nationally recognized herbalist in Lake Forest, Illinois.

Mrs. Gertrude Nielsen later donated funds for a new garden to reflect her interest in education. The result was the Heritage Garden, designed by Geoffrey Rausch and modeled after Europe’s first scientific botanical garden in Padua, Italy. The Heritage Garden became a physical entrance to the rest of the Chicago Botanic Garden, as well as an educational introduction to horticulture.

The Simonds-Rausch master plan underlay other successful garden designs. The Japanese Garden was envisioned from the earliest stages of the plan to be located on three small islands near the center of the Chicago Botanic Garden site. Designed by the noted Japanese landscape architect Koichi Kawana, Sansho-En, or the "garden of three islands," was completed in 1982, revealing the Zen-like character of a Japanese stroll garden, but also corresponding to the Garden’s overall sense of place with plant selections well adapted to Illinois’ Midwestern climate. A few years later, a nearby overlook and slope created as part of the original master plan were transformed into the Waterfall Garden, which featured its own palette of water-loving plants and also provided a graceful transition from the clear order of Sansho-En to the sweeping naturalism that marks most other landscapes of the Chicago Botanic Garden. The success of these and other gardens added over the years has depended on the balance of two overall tenets of design at the Chicago Botanic Garden: adherence to the master plan and the spirit of innovation in design and plant selection.

"Our gardens are contemporary and constantly changing," said Mr. Jarantoski, "but none of them has taken us off the path we set for ourselves in the 1960s."

Among the three recent garden projects, the Great Basin by Oehme, van Sweden & Associates is the largest and most elaborate. In terms of structure, plant selection and other elements of design, the Great Basin — including its dominant feature, Evening Island — follows ideas that were established in the master plan, including long vistas and the possibility for extensive aquatic gardens. It also represents the opportunity for Oehme, van Sweden to create a distinctly contemporary garden in the New American Garden style.

James van Sweden called Evening Island a "metaphor for the American meadow," creating a community of trees, grasses and wildflowers. Similar to the classic Midwestern prairie, the dramatic effect is composed with waves of color — in brilliant streaks, blurred edges and a succession of changes that define each season. Broad sweeps of perennials are joined by large masses of flowering crab apples; they line a shore that also is layered with an unprecedented assortment of aquatic plants. Mr. Oehme and Mr. van Sweden hope many of plantings, particularly the crabapples, will help establish a garden theme and vocabulary as characteristic of the Midwest as cherry blossoms of the Tidal Basin have become in their home city, Washington, D.C.

Counterpoint to the Great Basin project, nearby Spider Island features a rough-hewn plank bridge and miniature bosque in a garden inspired by "dreams, fleeting thoughts and memories," as designer Michael Van Valkenburgh has described the elements of his imagination. Spider Island’s intimate shoreline walk is marked by vivid sensations — hanging flowers of black alder, a foreshortened slope of gray birch, layers of prairie plants and an arrangement of natural boulders in a u-shape. This project exemplifies the aesthetic precision that has made Michael Van Valkenburgh one of the nation’s most influential designers.

While Oehme, van Sweden’s and Michael Van Valkenburgh’s new gardens represent leading-edge trends, another recent project at the Garden, the new Botanic Garden Center, makes an elegant statement within the vocabulary of 20^th-century modernism. The building stands partially concealed behind a gentle slope layered with crab apples, hawthorns and serviceberries. To the side, an allée of sugar maples curves to a formal "gingko courtyard," then to a refined glass entrance. Inside, flowing workspaces are skylit and lined with horizontal windows, which open back to a continuous panorama of the gardens outside. Mr. Kiley refers to these indoor-outdoor relationships as the "spatial mysteries" of modernism. They also represent absolute mastery of old canons to create something new.

Each of the designers involved in these projects was guided by the rich heritage of the Chicago Botanic Garden, as well as the highest principles of architecture and design. Their work represents significant growth for the Garden and equally for the field of landscape architecture and garden design. Such harmonies between an established institution and individual artists, also between the Garden’s own sense of place and design of international stature, have raised the profile of the Chicago Botanic Garden. More importantly, they have advanced the Garden in its fundamental mission, which is the harmonious relationship between humankind and nature.

Jay Pridmore is a Chicago-based journalist and author with an interest in 20^th-century history. His recent books include View from the River, chronicling Chicago architecture, and Northwestern University at 150, the sesquicentennial history of Northwestern University in Evanston, Illinois.