Lurie Garden

Some of the initial ideas for my garden design came from The Lurie Garden. This week, I had the dream opportunity to go to the Lurie Garden when a work even brought me to Chicago. Unfortunately, it is not the best time of the year to see the salvia river, but still a great opportunity. Fortunately the office and hotel were only a few blocks away. After a few hours flight, then an hour long train ride, I arrived at the Washington station, and with the rain falling, and sunset imminent, I hoofed it over to the Lurie Garden. Who cares if I and my luggage got wet! It was my only time that I would have to see it, with a full agenda of meetings, so I was going to see it, darn it!

It was rather gratifying to see that the garden looked fairly ragged. Even great gardens have their down time. This is a living, dynamic space after all, not the photographs that I would see on the web. So I felt gratified that this real garden, designed by a famous garden designer, still had it's down time. My garden is also not picture perfect, every day of the year. Far from it. This is what the salvia river looks like now, the blue being filled in with grape hyacinths.

I got a sense that the prairie must have been fairly featureless before all the cities and roads were built. Some might find it boring. I find it to be peaceful.

It is a much smaller space than I expected, and the famous hedges didn't border the space on 3 sides as I though they would have, based on the photos.

Beautiful walkway.

Probably a month behind Albuquerque, the daffodils were coming up.

Stems are intentionally left long in order to house overwintering insects. This made me wonder about the differences in philosophy: 1) clean up the garden in the fall in order to remove disease and bad insects, or 2) leave the stems to give winter protection to the plants, and good insects?

These Mertensias would never survive the heat and dry of Albuquerque.

 

 View of the Lurie Garden from my meeting space.