Garfield Park Conservatory

For millions of years, green plants have been using the sunlight, air and water to build the molecules of sugar that sustain life on Earth and for as long as curiosity and inquiry have existed, people have been thinking about plants and how they work. Today, thousands of years later, science has made great progress in the study of photosynthesis, but we still do not fully understand the intricacies of this process. The Sugar from the Sun exhibit is our tribute to the enduring history and complexity of plants and the simplicity of our absolute dependence on them. Stroll through four exotic botanical environments to discover how right now, inside every leaf, plants are capturing sunlight and using it to change small parts of air and water into sugar – the energy that sustains life on Earth.

Sugar from the Sun is open during Conservatory hours 9:00 am – 5:00 pm daily; Wednesdays till 8:00 pm

Because of its southern exposure, this room has the most access to the sun’s rays. Once called the Stove House and then the Warm Room, this greenhouse was appropriately renamed the Sweet House in 2000 when the sweet fruiting plants and trees of the former Economic House next door (now the Children’s Garden) were relocated here.

In 2003, the National Science Foundation awarded a $1.7 million grant to the Garfield Park Conservatory Alliance to create a living plant exhibit that brings to light the crucial, yet widely misunderstood process by which plants harness sunlight energy to produce the food, oxygen, and resources we need every day. In March 2008, this historic room reopened its doors as Sugar from the Sun, a living plant exhibit that immerses people in sunlight, air, water, and sugar - the elements plants use to fuel life on Earth.

The Cinnamon Tree

From Stove House, to Warm Room, to Sweet House and now Sugar from the Sun, our cinnamon tree has lived through all four incarnations of this room. At over sixty years old, this tree and its spice-producing bark has a well-respected senior presence in our newly renovated historic green house.

Banana Biodiversity

99.9% of the bananas in the world were not grown from seed, but were propagated from underground stems. This means that most of the bananas in the world have the same genetic make-up as the rest of the bananas in the world. Remember the song, "Yes, we have no bananas"? That tune represents a time, in the 1930’s, when a blight attacked many popular banana varieties making them no longer available. So far, scientists and growers have been able to keep the world’s current supply free of devastating diseases, but since they are all genetic copies of each other they remain vulnerable to disease and pests. Because bananas represent an important world food source, protecting them is a big deal and thus banana biodiversity has become an important area of scientific research.