Garfield Park Conservatory

A dramatic garden is waiting for you in the “backyard” of the Conservatory. The City Garden integrates the city through and through. Urban hardy plantings, garden “communities” that meld easily one to the next, recycled bits of cityscape….this is a garden like no other.

The City Garden takes urban greening as its guiding principle, and it gives expression to that principle at multiple levels, from its structure to its materials and plantings. It also provides an important link in an ever-growing lacework of boulevards, gardens, and open spaces scattered beyond its borders.

The City Garden is located west of the Garfield Park Conservatory Display Houses.

City Garden is open Year Round during Conservatory Hours 9 am – 5 pm daily; Wednesdays till 8 pm.

The City Garden, the newest public garden in Chicago, has a varied history. This large enclosed outdoor space just west of the Desert House exit, has gone through many incarnations over the last 100 years. For example, it is here that city dwellers once played tennis on one of eight courts and dipped their toes in a large shallow wading pool. As the new City Garden, the space now reflects the needs of its contemporary metropolitan visitors by hosting outdoor events and exhibits and highlighting hardy urban landscapes, green roof displays, creative reuse of materials, and other urban greening endeavors.

The Bulls of 1893

The pair of bronze bulls that stand in the northeast “pasture" of the City Garden tow a long historical legend that dates all the way back to Chicago’s Columbian Exposition of 1893. The bulls’ have a famous pair of ancestors, two giant bison sculptures, created by the famous “animalier,” Edward Kemeys. These mammoth bison stood as native wildlife sentries to the Agricultural Building during the famous fair of the 1800’s. After this historic Chicago happening, smaller plaster models of these bison were salvaged and eventually recast for a special 1909 Garfield Park art event. Made of plaster and placed near the park’s formal garden, these bison replicas were again recast (this time in bronze) and again moved (to Humboldt Park) in the early to mid- 20th century. To replace and commemorate the roving bison, collaborating artists Daniel C. French and Edward C. Potter designed and installed a pair of bronze bulls that stood as new and improved sentries to Garfield Park. Next to each bull stood a goddess, one holdings wheat sheaves and representing an Old World Roman goddess of grain, while the other held maize, and symbolized the New World Native American goddess of corn. These bulls remained in Garfield Park until the mid -1980’s, when vandals unfortunately stole one of the bull sculptures and damaged the other. In 2003, sculptor conservator Andrzej Dajnowski recreated the missing sculpture and repaired the damaged one, ensuring the bison and bulls’ story continued by re-installing them in the new City Garden behind the Conservatory.

The Historic Hawthorn Grove

The shady area under the group of hawthorn trees in the southwest corner of the City Garden has hosted many a picnic over the last 100 years. In fact, it is believed these trees were planted by Jens Jensen himself before the Conservatory was built in 1907. Hawthorn trees, a trade-mark planting of Jensen’s, imitate the lines of an idealized prairie, with their horizontal branches growing parallel to the ground. Jensen also felt that the branching habits of these native trees softened the landscape and let it breathe. Whatever their age, these magnificent trees have cast their soft eye on our conservatory for a very long time.

Lily Pond

Enjoy the upper and lower Lily Ponds in the City Garden when they are bursting with lilies in the summer. These ponds are separated by a bridge that gives you a birds-eye view of the lilies below.

Bluestone Terrace

Living in the urban environment we do, there is plenty of hardscape around. But that doesn’t mean you can’t garden. Our Bluestone Terrace show how plants can be used to soften and enhance an expanse of stone. The plants featured here were selected because they relate loosely to the Desert House just inside. The Bluestone Terrace is perfect for enjoying a picnic, or even holding a wedding!