The Flowery City

July 9th, 2019

   I’m beginning to think that maybe the appreciation of flowers is inversely proportional to the lousiness of your winter weather.

Lurie Garden is a colorful meadow right in the heart of downtown Chicago.

   Boothbay, Maine, is pretty cold and icy over a long winter, but the little coast-line town has one of the nation’s best botanical gardens, the Coastal Maine Botanical Gardens.

     Buffalo, N.Y., is one of America’s snowiest cities – sometimes getting snow in May – but its citizens love to garden and stage the country’s biggest garden tour, the 400-garden Garden Walk Buffalo that happens at the end of each July.

   I’m just back from leading a tour to Chicago – well known for its piercingly cold winter winds – and that city has more publicly planted gardens, pots, and street-side planters than any other place I’ve been.

See my photo gallery of pictures of Chicago’s botanical beauty and gardens along the way

   Chicago is investing a lot of public dollars in beautifying itself.

   Plants and color are everywhere… rose gardens in parks, huge concrete planters in street medians, flower-pot gardens lining sidewalks, one of the nation’s best botanical gardens (the Chicago Botanic Garden), a huge vegetable garden on the roof of the city’s convention center (McCormick Place), and two of America’s best conservatories (Garfield Park and Lincoln Park).

   Most of it is funded or at least partly supported by tax dollars. In a lot of places, people would revolt at having their tax dollars spent on flowers, but we were told that the majority of Chicagoans consider it money well spent.

   One of our tour guides said that folks there “crave” flowers and would miss all of the plantings if the city cut them out.

One of the many planted beds in downtown Chicago.

   Years ago at a horticulture conference, I talked to one of the Chicago mayor’s staff, and he said that flowers were more than just pretty faces.

   He said prior to all of the flowering, Chicago was seen as a cold, dark city that wasn’t high on the business world’s convention radar. But after planting masses of flowers at the airport and planters, pots, and hanging flower baskets throughout key areas of the city, visitors began to notice.

   Pretty soon, word spread that Chicago was a surprisingly colorful and welcoming city. Tourism went up, convention traffic boomed, and the dollars related to those more than paid for the planting efforts.

   In other words, Chicago found plants to be an economic investment.

   What’s more, the city staffer told me that the plantings turned out to be a morale booster for the residents.

The beautiful fern room at Garfield Park Conservatory.

   People praised the color, and he said that one of the concerns – vandalism of the pots and baskets – wasn’t an issue at all.

   He told of one sewer-repair project in which the city tore up the best part of a city block. In the end, instead of just finishing the job with concrete, the city spent extra money turning the area into a landscaped park.

   He said the city got more positive feedback from that than any other project, including profuse thank-you’s from the residents of that neighborhood who really appreciated the green space. They were heartened and surprised that the city would invest tax dollars in beautifying their poor neighborhood.

   None of that should surprise avid gardeners. We know the many benefits of gardening, which are backed up by research showing that planted environments reduce depression and possibly even contribute to longer lives.  

   And that’s not even counting the excellent free exercise we get by chasing away the groundhogs…