GreenMark Public Relations®, Inc.

Lurie Garden in Millennium Park, Sept. 23

Things are set to get a little more wild in Chicago as the Lurie Garden in Millennium Park welcomes acclaimed garden expert and author Rick Darke. Co-sponsored by the Winnetka Garden Club, his presentation, “All Things Wild and Sustainable in the New Global Garden,” takes place at 6 p.m. on Thursday, Sept. 23 in the Millennium Park Room on the fifth floor of the Chicago Cultural Center, 78 E. Washington St.

Darke, from Landenberg, Pa., will draw on his unique perspective and expansive background in landscape ethics, photography and contextual design. He will share his thoughts on creating and enjoying gardens as dynamic as they are livable and ecological. In his multi-media presentation, Darke will show examples of authentic, re-vegetative habitats-as-gardens, including notable progressive parks in Germany.

The Lurie Garden is an appropriate place for a discussion on global gardens and the creativity that results from a fusion of local elements and international talent: its four-season, sustainable design is based on an international competition, with a lead landscape architect from Seattle and a perennial planting designer from The Netherlands.

The Lurie Garden is located at the southeast corner of Millennium Park, near the corner of Columbus Drive and Monroe Street. Millennium Park is easily reached by CTA and adjacent public parking is available. It is universally accessible to patrons with disabilities. For more information, visit www.millenniumpark.org.

Visit www.luriegarden.org for more information about the Lurie Garden, including programming, seasonal highlights, plant features and design elements. For more information about Darke’s lecture, and to register, call 312-744-0078. For more information about Darke, visit www.rickdarke.com.

Chicago’s public television station, WTTW-TV (Channel 11) featured The Lurie Garden’s “Wild Adaptations & Native Plants Workshop” as a great free thing to do with the kids on “Chicago Tonight” Thursday, Aug. 20, 2009; live at 7 p.m. The workshop was one of The Lurie Garden’s many featured family workshops over the summer.

Learn about the next family event on The Lurie Garden web site.

Watch the particular clip of “Chicago Tonight on WTTW’s web site. Also in this clip Time Out Chicago’s Around Town Editor Madeline Nusser gives The Lurie Garden a nice compliment, saying she visits at least once a week to eat lunch in the beautiful garden.

If there’s not a featured event event at The Lurie Garden, come anyway and have a picnic in downtown Chicago!

If you’re from Chicago and find yourself strolling through West Manhattan, New York, you may feel a little deja-vu. That’s because the High Line recently opened, giving NYC a little Windy City breeze. The High Line was originally designed in the 1930s to elevate freight trains off of the streets, similar to Chicago’s ‘L’ system. It has since undergone a major green overhaul and Section 1 is now a beautiful park. When all sections are complete, the High Line will be a mile-and-a-half-long elevated park, running through the West Side neighborhoods of the Meatpacking District, West Chelsea and Clinton/Hell’s Kitchen. The High Line has more Chicago influence than just the mass-transit connection, the planting designer was the same artist that designed The Lurie Garden: Piet Oudolf.

In fall 2008, High Line’s landscape team consulted with Oudolf on how to bring the garden to life, beginning by planting perennials, grasses, shrubs and trees. Oudolf chose species for their hardiness, sustainability, and textural and color variation, with a focus on native species. Many of the species that originally grew on the High Line’s rail bed are incorporated into the park landscape. The 210 species in Section 1 bloom from late January to mid-November.

The Lurie Garden and the rest of Chicago’s Millennium Park is the largest green roof in the world, as it covers a structural deck supported by two reinforced concrete cast-in-place garages and steel structures that span the space above Illinois Central Railroad tracks. Ironically, the Industrial Revolution that brought about these railroad tracks as well as prosperity and wealth are now being re-tooled by an even larger and more important revolution: the green revolution.

Critics say building green roofs and parks over structures like these are akin to putting Band-Aids on old wounds. Well, maybe with enough Band-Aids the Earth can start to heal. In the mean-time, “walk it off” with a stroll through either garden; or get some desktop exercise and check out the beautiful pictures on the High Line Web site.

Photo Credits:
A panorama taken on the newly opened High Line Park in Chelsea, Manhattan by Gbarill
View of the west shoulder hedge and armature of the Lurie Garden by Alex Cheek

Posted on Apr. 15, 2009 on Simply Landscaping’s blog, the company that created The Lurie Garden won the top award from The American Society of Landscape Architects in the 2008 ASLA Professional Awards. Seattle-based Gustafson Guthrie Nichol Ltd transformed a parking garage rooftop into a public botanical garden, located in Millennium Park in downtown Chicago, combining engineered elements with native Midwestern perennials.

 Read the blog post on Simply Landscaping’s website.

Looking for something fun to do this spring/summer in Chicago without breaking the bank? Chicago Sun-Times published an article on Apr. 1, 2009 highlighting Chicagoland events that don’t cost too much. Misha Davenport featured The Lurie Garden as the second item in the article “Bowling for dollars, and walking and viewing and zooming and eating and laughing and listening.” She said if you want to get in touch with nature, “Spring should soon be busting out all over Millennium Park’s Lurie Garden. The urban oasis takes the city’s Latin motto Urbs in Horto (City in a Garden) seriously. Highlights of the five-acre-garden include the 15-foot-high hedge that protects the perennial garden from the wind. Free guided garden walks are offered beginning May 10, or you can pack a lunch and take it on your own.”

Not only can you get in touch with nature or give that tree a hug this summer, you can do it for free at The Lurie Garden.

You can also see the first bulbs of the spring, taped on sight at The Lurie Garden by ABC 7 News Chicago, here.

The Lurie Garden and Chalet Landscaping appeared together in an article on the website of Perennial & Nursery News, Apr. 2009. The five acre Lurie Garden in Chicago’s Millennium Park was the inspiration for Chalet’s Top Ten Winning entry in the 2008 Perennials Marketing Contest sponsored by Plant Publicity Holland and the Perennial Plant Association.

Freya Wellin, perennial manager of Chalet Nursery, who achieved an outstanding display, said “I wanted to use an inspirational garden to show how to think differently about designing with sustainable perennials… As something to emulate, Lurie Garden, a public green space in downtown Chicago, fit the bill. The garden mixes natives with cultivated perennials to create a lovely meadow-like feel, while still being a controlled planting.”

To reach the display, Chalet customers had to walk through a metal archway surrounded by a variety of arborvitaes - similar to the experience at The Lurie Garden, which echoes Chicago’s classical architecture. Freya explains, “The body of the display was made up of one and three gallon potted perennials put in wedge shape display beds. each bed had two or more types of grass interspersed with three or more flowering perennials. The taller grasses were placed on the side of the display with the shorter ones in the middle which created vistas similar to those at The Lurie Garden.”

Both The Lurie Garden and Chalet also appeared together in the March/April 2009 issue of Chicagoland Gardening.

Roy Diblik, one of the leading plants-men in the United States, was featured on page 30 of the magazine, where they give a brief biography including the fact that more than 18,000 of his plants are in The Lurie Garden, where he worked closely with the gardens’ Dutch designer Piet Oudolf. Now an advocate for sustainable public landscapes, Diblik has also designed gardens for The Shedd Aquarium, the Art Institute of Chicago, College of DuPage, Olbrich Botanical Gardens in Madison, the Village of Fontana (in Wisconsin) and the Grand Geneva Resort & Spa in Lake Geneva.

Several of Chalet’s spring events appeared on page 77 in the magazine, including Favorite Spring-Flowering Shrubs, Vegetables 101, Plant of the Week Introductions, New and Under-used Perennials, Planting Perennial Communities (Apr. 9 or 10), Using Containers in the Landscape (Apr. 16 or 17), and Spring Lawn Care (Apr. 23 or 24).

 Gardening - Activists Urge Obamas to Install Vegetable Garden at White House - washingtonpost.com (Jan. 18, 2009)

GreenMark PR’s client The Lurie Garden is mentioned in this Washington Post article by Adrian Higgins as “an example of a thoughtful, provocative and vital municipal” landscape in the 21st century. The article raises an excellent point that GreenMark PR supports - the necessity for a significant organic vegetable garden on White House property. GreenMark PR calls for Barack Obama and the White House horticulture staff to celebrate its first spring at 1600 Pennsylvania Ave. with the planting of a significant organic vegetable garden that would not only supply food to its residents and visitors, but would support local food pantries and the development of a nationwide Locavore movement. We agree this would help reduce our nation’s reliance on fossil fuels and unsustainable agricultural practices, feed our families more cost-effectively with nutritious food and reduce obesity and disease, while helping educate a younger generation on the merits of caring for the earth and its resources.