CITY GARDEN PLAN
One plans not places, or spaces or things—one plans experiences.
John Ormsbee Simonds, Landscape Architecture: The Shaping of Man’s Natural Environment
The dramatic new garden now taking shape next to Garfield Park Conservatory is 12 acres of undulating, free flowing plant material that challenges prevailing notions of what a major public garden is supposed to be. Unlike traditional botanical gardens, Garfield Park City Garden does not organize its features into stylistic or culturally referenced rooms. There are no Japanese or English gardens here, or built architectural elements (walls and pergolas) to give it “bones.” Instead, the City Garden’s impact comes from the lushly planted contours of its sculpted earth mounds. Strollers experience the garden as an unfolding journey through rich botanical environments where changes in elevation, color, form, habitat, scale, and openness continually delight the senses and inspire the mind. The City Garden expresses its unique sense of place by recognizing Garfield Park’s historic roots, while celebrating its present day urban context.
Visitors won’t find Japanese raked gravel or Renaissance urns in Garfield Park City Garden. They will find gravel, and concrete, too--materials that say “city” yet integrate elegantly into exuberant plantings. The City Garden welcomes the community with multiple access points, its winding walks becoming everyday footpaths for local residents. Rather than a walled, single-gated horticultural museum separate from the neighborhood, the City Garden is a burst of botanical splendor in an open lacework pattern of gardens, boulevards, and green spaces that softly weave together the fabric of the community.
Inspirations, Innovations, New Experiences
In seeking inspiration for a daringly modern urban garden, Chicago Park District planners borrowed an elliptical form Jens Jensen used a hundred years ago to define open space at Garfield Park. That oval form appears throughout the City Garden as its main structural and unifying motif, most dramatically as a large mound located at the center of the garden and as smaller ones across the southern perimeter. The central earthform is a three-dimensional sculpted ellipse pushing up some 25 feet from grade. The mound’s sinuous terrain creates different microclimates, permitting dazzling displays of diverse botanic beauty: a copse of poplars with leaves that shimmer silver in the summer wind, then turn brilliant yellow in fall; a ravine garden of shade-loving plants embedded into a steep incline on the backside of the mound; an arc of evergreen and fastigiate trees standing tall along the mound’s high ridge, creating a great green curtain as backdrop for flowering shrubs. Standing atop the ridge, a stroller is treated to a spectacular view of the Conservatory and the Chicago skyline.
Other symbolic motifs are inspired by the region’s geological past rather than its human history. Winding, braided paths suggest young streams inscribing themselves into the flatland. The paths create islands in their midst, perfect for planting individual gardens. The braided walks also provide apt symbolism for this contemporary urban garden, representing the interconnectedness of Chicago’s many cultures. Everywhere in the City Garden, paths pull strollers through evocative green incidents, where calm alternates with surprise, intensity with respite, and openness with shelter.
Garfield Park City Garden’s other features include:
Terrace and lawn Just west of the Desert Room in the Conservatory, a bluestone terrace transitions gracefully from architecture to nature. A gathering place for social events, the terrace is punctuated by small artistic gardens tucked between rectangles of stone. An adjoining elliptical lawn located at the base of the great central mound makes a cool visual contrast to intense plantings nearby, and allows a long western view toward the mound.
Gravel Garden Gravel is used as a growing medium not only to display plants that thrive in dry hot climates, but also to welcome people to walk freely among the purple, blue, and yellow flowering plants. Bits of indigo beach glass scattered among the pebbles set off the plants’ silver foliage. While the City Garden’s braided paths symbolically suggest meandering streams, the gravel garden suggests something else. The gravel surface invites strollers to do their own meandering, to step off the path and forge their own exploratory trails.
Lily Pool The 100-by-150-foot water feature introduces a heretofore unheard-of design element in a lily pool--a waterfall. The liquid ellipse includes, in fact, two pools--one cool, the other warm. The slightly elevated cool pool, home to hardy water plants such as lilies and purple-spiked Pickerel Weed, spills over into the lower warm pool where tropical day and night blooming lilies thrive, and Giant Water Platters (Victoria amazonica) sit like immense green saucers on the water’s surface. A path intersects the two segments of the pool, producing in visitors the sensation of walking through water.