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The John G. Shedd Aquarium offers a mesmerizing respite from summer heat with its cool darkness and lighted tanks of spectacular creatures. But the landscape around the aquarium offers a different kind of thrill.
Many people only enjoy its stunning lake and skyline views as they stand in line to get in. Yet the aquarium is surrounded by lovely, innovative, idea-packed gardens, all wrapped in those spectacular vistas. And you can enjoy the gardens for free.
In a nook near the imposing front steps is a vegetable garden with beehives. An expanse along the lake side is planted to welcome migratory birds, with berry-bearing native shrubs, seed-packed grasses and flowers, busy insects and a rippling waterfall.
A tucked-away rain garden absorbs runoff from a terrace in keeping with the aquarium's message about conserving and preserving water resources. Signs, new this year, explain what's going on in the gardens, with wildlife as well as the plants.
Christine Nye, the Shedd's horticulture programs manager, has been working since 1998 to create gardens that are relevant to the museum's conservation mission. She describes the result — a work still in progress — as "ornamental gardens with a sustainable edge."
The ornamental quality is important. The aquarium was built in the 1920s in the grand beaux-arts style with aquatic touches. For many years, its landscape was tidy and green but conventionally formal.
Now, there's a lively dialogue between the fanciful formality of the old building, the cool elegance of the modern addition and the many textures and shapes of widely varied plantings. The landscape bursts with color, movement and activity. Tall grasses swing in the breeze. There are bright annuals and everybody's favorite hydrangeas, but also Swiss chard, prickly pear cactus and pawpaw trees.
It's all designed to reduce maintenance, increase interest, sustain wildlife, save water and show visitors how they can have more satisfying and sustainable gardens.
"We view the gardens as an outdoor exhibit," says Meg Matthews, manager of conservation communications development at the museum.
Not everyone got it when Nye started planting vegetables and native perennials around a museum of deep-sea creatures. She persisted, enlisting Roy Diblik, who had worked with Piet Oudolf on the design for the Lurie Garden in Millennium Park, to help her select combinations of perennials that "play well together," requiring minimal intervention from gardeners. Over time, the aquarium's gardens have become a point of pride for the institution.
One of the gardens' goals is to help people think beyond exotic creatures from distant seas and value water here at home. The imposing Welcome Garden that greets visitors as they walk from the parking garage has a tumbling waterfall, with dwarf conifers perched among the rocks and plantings that combine native and non-native perennials including "Marmalade" yarrow, boneset and cup plant.
Native habitats are reflected nearby. Buttonbush and swamp milkweed thrive in a wetland garden that attracts rose-breasted grosbeaks and dragonflies. A duneland garden evokes the original landscape of this shore, before the landfill on which the aquarium sits, and includes native cacti and jack pine, false indigo and asters.
Stroll around the rear onto the lakefront bicycle path to find the newest and grandest part of the landscape: the migratory bird garden, sweeping outside the windows of the Oceanarium where the dolphins leap.
Chicago and the aquarium sit on the Mississippi Flyway, a major migration route. Millions of birds each year follow the great river and Great Lakes, stopping to rest and eat along the way. But a struggling, sterile lawn had little to offer them.
Now, birds have a place to rest, with shrubs such as chokeberry and serviceberry to provide fruit, Black Hills spruce for shelter, grasses and flowers for seeds. The blooms hum with bees. Last year's plant debris, chopped up and left on the ground as mulch, protects and enriches the soil, but it has an additional benefit: "This has brought so many insects," says Nye, "and that's what attracts birds."
The staff has spotted yellowthroats, kinglets, catbirds, cardinals and many other species, some just passing through and some here to stay. "We have birds we can't even identify," Nye says.
All the trees and shrubs and 70 percent of the perennials are natives, Nye says. But she has nothing against carefully chosen non-natives: "We see the native fauna using them," she says with a shrug. "As long as they're useful, I'm using them."
The garden is not just for the birds. It's also an inspiration to gardeners, even those with small plots, to plant for wildlife. "There's more recognition today that cities can still provide habitat," says Matthews.
This planting began four years ago when 18,000 square feet of scroungy turf was removed from soil so compacted that new plants had to be installed with pickaxes. Leaf mulch and time have done their work and the garden thrives with no fertilizer and little water. The next phase of 22,000 square feet is having a harder time getting started in this drought-ridden year. But Nye has faith in the survival abilities of sturdy, well-chosen plants.
The path back to the front steps leads past a rain garden that keeps rainwater out of storm sewers by capturing it in a swale that meanders among red lobelia, swamp milkweed, spicebush, lady's mantle, gentian, ferns, ligularia, monarda and penstemon. The garden was planted a year ago by Eagle Scout Daniel Drozda of La Grange.
Just south of the entrance, a formal parterre has become what Nye calls a "formalish" vegetable garden, with eggplants and tomatoes tucked between boxwood hedges. In this and another space nearby the staff grows lots of food. Some of the vegetables feed the animals indoors, such as lizards, turtles and tortoises, catfish and monkeys, and more is donated to the Pacific Garden Mission food pantry.
No chemicals are used, and the lawn is not weed-free. But it is so safe now that a yellow-footed tortoise can come out to graze and stretch his legs on a summer day. He scampers like a young colt, discovering the joys of the outdoors. It's an invitation to the rest of us.
Find more information, including a map, go to sheddaquarium.org (type "green gardens" in the search field). Maps also are posted at the Welcome Garden and by the front steps.
sunday@tribune.com
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