Enjoy Your Visit — WALK THE GARDEN

A Wonderland Express Walk

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Wonderland Chicago Botanic Garden families know that to truly celebrate the holidays, you must pay at least one visit to Wonderland Express. This unique blend of artistic wizardry, fanciful design, magnificent horticulture, and of course, the whizzing, whistling miniature trains, continues to delight children, parents, and grandparents, providing all with a joyful and magical experience. Whether your first loves are the plant displays, the trains, or the celebrations with friends and family, make sure you get on board for a fabulous journey!

Anticipation builds quickly at the Lake Cook Road entrance as soon as you catch sight of the sculptural specimen trees twinkling with thousands of white lights. More than 750,000 energy-efficient LED bulbs have been used to illuminate the large deciduous trees, the signature 40-foot spruce in the Esplanade, clusters of Christmas trees in containers, and much more. These small, light-emitting diodes (LED) burn brightly and they reduce energy consumption greatly. You can stop at the Garden Café or select gifts from the Garden Shop either before or after your visit.

Walking through the Heritage Garden toward Wonderland Express, sparkling yew hedges and four Cornelian cherry dogwood trees that anchor this garden will light your way. The water that once filled the pools and cascaded over the central fountain has been drained for winter, and the pools are now stuffed to the brim with festive green arborvitae boughs. In the middle is a lit Christmas tree decorated with handmade edible ornaments—just for the birds. Continue along the path to Regenstein Center, where glowing Christmas trees in wooden box containers light up the Bonsai Courtyards, while the prized bonsai winter in climate-controlled quarters at the south end of the Garden.

Wonderland The Greenhouse Galleries are lined with ivory and crimson poinsettias and oversized designer wreaths, perfect inspiration for your own holiday décor. Be sure to step inside the three Garden Greenhouses, which offer warmth, fragrance, and seasonal surprises!

Eight tall Mexican fan palm trees, wrapped in white lights, line the entrance to the Tropical Greenhouse, which is enhanced by hundreds of white moth orchids, coral poinsettias, and a special “tree” constructed of pink- and magenta-flowering bromeliads and white moth orchids delicately etched in purple.

The Semitropical Greenhouse blooms with red poinsettias, purple tibouchina, and a huge red hibiscus tree. Children will especially enjoy this space as they search for their favorite topiary animals hiding amongst the greenery. Suspended from the ceiling are brilliant red ornament globes fashioned entirely from poinsettia plants.

As you enter the Wonderland Express exhibition, you will pass through a gallery of Christmas trees decorated by local designers, and large mural photographs detailing the construction of Wonderland Express by Paul Busse and his creative associates at Applied Imagination in Alexandria, Kentucky. The big show reveals itself gradually as an entire indoor landscape of hundreds of live evergreens, flowering plants, ground covers, perennials, ferns, and more comes into view. This multitiered landscape is the setting for all the garden-scale model trains that speed along tracks, zoom across bridges and under trestles, and disappear around the bends. Central to the spectacle is a cascading waterfall that plummets down to a pool below and then flows into a river that runs through rocky terrain.

Wonderland Where to look first? Children will follow their favorite trains, while adults will surely marvel at the handcrafted, exquisitely detailed replicas of 80 of Chicago’s most famous landmarks sited throughout this landscape. The buildings are constructed of all-natural materials collected in the wild: gourds, pine cones, bark and wooden logs, acorns, eucalyptus pods, grains and grasses, and so much more. There’s Frank Gehry’s band shell and Anish Kapoor’s Cloud Gate (“Bean”) from Millennium Park. Look for the old Marshall Field’s clock, St. Patrick’s Church, the Museum of Science and Industry, Chicago Stadium, and the Newberry Library. Not sure of your architecture? Helpful signs will clue you in. Veteran visitors can look forward to several new buildings this year, including the Garden’s own Rice Plant Conservation Science Center, which is under construction, and the Lincoln Park Zoo Seal House.

Gardeners in the group will be awed by the plants—the variety, color, texture, and how beautifully they replicate the landscape-at-large. Many of these plants are true dwarf conifers, while others “suggest” or mimic an allée, orchard, grove, or mountain forest. The tree forms are completely realistic and include all the natural shapes trees assume: weeping, upright, pyramidal, creeping, mounding, and more. Holiday plants and full-size, lit Christmas trees are integrated beautifully into the scenes, while snow falls silently from above.

Wonderland Continue to the adjoining Krehbiel Gallery, where you can envision yourself in a simulated train station of yore, with doorways festooned with magnolia swags, chubby wreaths made of red apples and yellow pears, window boxes overflowing with ivy, and mysterious unclaimed suitcases from another time and place. A colorful landscaped garden with more model trains runs the length of this space, and children can get a close-up and personal view as the garden-scale train chugs their way. The color scheme of flowers and foliage speaks of the holidays, but pushes the tones to chartreuse and strawberry, pink and emerald.

When it’s time to say goodbye and open the doors to the outside world, the Esplanade awaits with one final impression: a fully lit tree set against the water’s edge, surrounded by playful spheres in brilliant tones. Joy to All!