The Lurie Garden and Chalet Landscaping start new wave in perennial design
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).
Tags: Chalet Landscaping, Nursery and Garden Center, The Lurie Garden