Green museums spruce up to improve their profiles

Befitting the quiet, methodical approach of gardeners, two suburban museums are in the midst of changes designed to raise their public profiles to the level of world-class museums and research centers like the titans of Chicago’s city museum community.

The Morton Arboretum, a national leader in tree research in Lisle, 25 miles west of Chicago, will have spent $43 million by 2005 when it finishes retooling a couple dozen acres at the heart of its 1,700-acre park, installing new visitor amenities aimed at boosting annual attendance from 450,000 to 750,000. It will spend more than $80 million by the time its master plan is finished in 15 years.

Twenty-five miles north of the city in Glencoe, the Chicago Botanic Garden is in its third year of a $100 million makeover. It’s already opened several new display gardens in a bid to increase attendance from 750,000 to a million annual visitors. Now the 385-acre garden is expanding facilities that will make it a major botanic research and education center.

The arboretum and the botanic garden are in the vanguard of public gardens nationally that are raising and spending mega-millions to get the public to come in and smell the roses.

In doing so, they are following the lead of zoos and major indoor museums that have experienced an explosion of popularity in the last 20 years through expansion and creation of innovative, spectacular new exhibits.

“Most arboreta and botanical gardens are much more active these days working to attract and serve larger audiences,” said Gerard Donnelly, Morton Arboretum’s executive director.

“Public gardens really are catching up with their museum brethren who have been doing this for a number of years.”

Gardening has become the most popular leisure-time activity in the United States, said Sharon Lee, deputy director of the Delaware-based American Association of Botanical Gardens and Arboreta (AABGA), indicative of a yearning to re-connect with nature.

“Seventy-five percent of all U.S. households engage in some form of gardening,” said Lee.

That interest has spilled over to public gardens, she said, as AABGA’s membership has grown since 1985 from 300 to more than 500 public gardens and 200 more institutions in various stages of getting started.

“Chicago is fortunate,” she said, “in having two very major institutions in the Morton Arboretum and Chicago Botanic that are very healthy and expanding.”

In the past, the arboretum and botanic garden were viewed as primarily serving audiences in their own suburban areas, each with its own loyal individual and corporate donors. In the last decade, each has broadened its visitor and donor bases, making current expansions possible.

The changes at Morton Arboretum are the biggest in the history of the 81-year-old institution. In 1990, when Donnelly took the arboretum’s reins, it was drawing about 200,000 visitors annually, a figure that relied on heavy attendance in the autumn as people meandered through the changing colors of its densely wooded acres.

More than its visitors, the arboretum then placed emphasis on its work as a top botanic research and demonstration center, developing trees hardy enough to survive harsh northern winters and in concrete-and-smog city landscapes.

In the current, $43 million phase of spending, almost all the money is going to improve visitor amenities.

It begins with a new, more accessible entrance off Illinois Highway 53, due to open this autumn. By next year, visitors will park in a new lot at a new visitor center with expanded educational, dining and shopping facilities.

The visitor center will overlook a cleaned up and restored Meadow Lake and two new formal displays, a shrubbery maze garden and a $7.5 million children’s garden, scheduled to open in 2005.

Those changes cover a tiny fraction of the sprawling arboretum grounds, which will remain mostly untouched. As a part of its master plan, the arboretum has reduced its paved roads from 11 to 9 miles and increased its walking trails from 12 to 14 miles to encourage people to get out of their cars more.

It is establishing sheltered visitor stations at key locations through the park with interpretive signs giving more information than previous facilities, including one inaugurated this year as a trailhead leading into the arboretum’s showcase Schulenberg Prairie.

The 31-year-old Chicago Botanic Garden, more a place of formal, strolling display gardens than the arboretum, since 2001 has added enough new spaces and attractions–like its Great Basin and Evening Island–so that the park can comfortably accommodate a million annual visitors.

Now the garden is revving up its research and education efforts in a bid to make a national reputation in those areas.

The garden’s research staff already has grown from four persons eight years ago to 23 today, and there are plans to increase by more than double its research capabilities and facilities in the future.

“A big part of what we are doing,” said Larry DeBuhr, vice president for education at the garden, “is geared toward a very broad initiative of training the next generation of plant scientists at all levels.”

No area universities or colleges offer undergraduate or graduate degrees in botany, said DeBuhr. The garden is offering its facilities as a classroom and its professional staff as adjunct faculty to partner with a number of schools, already offering 40 credit courses through Loyola University.

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It also wants to develop undergraduate and graduate coursework for landscape design and horticulture in partnership with area schools.

“To do that, we have to improve a number of components at the garden, including improving and increasing the size of our library facility, partially to house the purchase last year of Massachusetts Horticultural Society’s rare book collection.”

“We’re trying to not add any new buildings to the main, central part of the park,” said DeBuhr. “Any new buildings will be on the park periphery, away from public areas.”

Though research at the botanic garden and the arboretum isn’t yet at the level of national and international botanic juggernauts like the Missouri Botanical Gardens or the Royal Botanic Gardens in England, they do work regionally that nobody else is doing.

“It’s really exciting that between the Morton, the botanic garden and Field Museum, that each of us has its own role locally, nationally and internationally,” said Gregory Mueller, chair of the Field’s botany department, which is an international research powerhouse.

“We’re lucky to have these two institutions to partner with. We’re already working with them on several projects that enhance the work of all three institutions, including a virtual herbarium collection of regional plants on the Internet and conservation work with Chicago Wilderness.”