Celebrating Urban Botanical Gardens
This summer I was in Chicago for a visit and ran across a botanical garden right in the heart of the city called Lurie Garden. Known as Millennium Park's "secret garden", it provided a space for peace in the midst of the urban bustle of the city, and immersed me in memories of my childhood growing up in Northwest Illinois, reminding me of the marshes and meadows that cover the state.
Lurie Garden in August
Prairie plants draw a lovely contrast to Chicago’s famous skyscrapers.
Chicago may be known for its hostile winters, but its hardy native plants and trees reflect a Chicagoan's spirit of sustaining through the winter and celebrating in a flurry of activity and exuberance in the warmer months. This next picture features some of the colorful flora of the end-of-summer season.
See if you can spot Echinacea simulata (wavyleaf purple coneflower), rudbeckia fulgida (black-eyed Susan), and Achillea millefolium (white yarrow).
Find more of the Lurie Garden’s plantlife in their online catalog at https://www.luriegarden.org/plant-life/
Urban botanical gardens are a lovely way to bring that sense of natural place to what can otherwise feel like a tangle concrete, sidewalks, and skyscrapers. Many cities across the United States boast gardens that are full of native plantlife. The New York Botanical Garden located in the Bronx has a native plant garden that covers 3.5 acres of grounds with nearly 100,000 native trees, shrubs, wildflowers, ferns, and grasses. The North Carolina Botanical Garden located in Chapel Hill is specifically geared towards the research, catalog, and promotion of the native plant species of North Carolina.
Although I now live in Southern California and celebrate the sight of buckwheat and sage, my visits back to Illinois are all the more vivid with the prairie grass and purple coneflower. As many of us travel home for the holidays take a moment to notice the native plantlife around you and how it can change your perspective. There may be a nature preserve or botanical garden to visit, or even just a walk through a neighborhood.
