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An ancient glacier. A swampy marsh. A renowned landscape architect. The Chinese Garden of Perfect Brightness. Tie them together and the result is part of the intriguing back story of the Chicago Botanic Garden—which starts long before the Garden’s groundbreaking in 1965. Next time you visit the Garden, take a closer look at the topography and you can still make out the origins of all that beauty. “One designs not places, or spaces or things—one designs experiences.”
John O. Simonds, Landscape Architect

Chicago artists have been busy in their studios creating installations with uplifting messages to welcome visitors to the Chicago Botanic Garden’s Lightscape. Matthew Hoffman’s 12-foot-tall sculpture celebrates the word JOY: “the expression of love, comfort, and happiness when we're with the ones we love.”

It has been five months since the Black Lives Matter movement ignited a new civil rights movement and caused the Chicago Botanic Garden to reflect and recommit to equity, diversity, inclusion, and accessibility for our staff, our visitors, our volunteers, and our boards. Part of that process is to take a hard look at the stories the Garden tells about gardens, plants, and people.

Dinosaur snacks and other Garden trivia you should know We love our Grand Tram Tour drivers—they’ll tell you things that most people (and even Google) don’t know about the Chicago Botanic Garden. Take this quick quiz on just a few of the factoids that the drivers share. We know you’ll ace this (except for maybe the "Making waves..." question; there’s something a bit fishy about it). Need a refresher? Grand Tram Tours are scheduled to run daily through October 11.

Love is in the air...we ❤️ the date nights, meet-cutes, and anniversaries at the Garden—and watching the 50 or so couples who got engaged last year at our holiday event Lightscape. So we got to thinking about romantic spots on our 385 acres and heart-fluttering engagement moments.

How does the natural world affect a community’s health and well-being? Over the course of one year, 16 Chicago high school students from the Instituto Health Sciences Career Academy (IHSCA) sought to find the answer.

The Victory Garden movement in World War II encouraged a nation of gardens. The results were impressive: 20 million gardens were established, and 40 percent of fruits and vegetables were homegrown. In Chicago, the Chicago Horticultural Society, the parent organization of the Chicago Botanic Garden, had a leading role, helping to create the largest acreage of urban land under cultivation in the country.

Gardening is all about embracing change. You plant seeds and wait to see which ones will sprout. You monitor emerging spring buds to mark the time until leaf-out and see which ones were affected by Chicago’s harsh winter. And you watch as the bulbs you planted last fall emerge strongly but are not quite the color you were expecting.

We all remember first learning about haiku in grade school with the familiar pattern of three phrases written in five, seven, and five syllables. As I developed this year’s Words in Bloom: A Year of Haiku program, I learned that the world of haiku is an expansive one with many forms. Designed to be “one breath” poems with a focus on nature, haiku has the power to strike an emotional chord.

The first full moon of spring is lovely enough, but the upcoming one is a gift from nature—and the perfect time to take a night walk. On Tuesday, April 7, head outside to see the biggest and brightest supermoon of the year. Whether you prefer to walk in solitude or with family members, don’t miss peak illumination at 9:35 p.m. Central Standard Time.