University Place

Road Trippin': Wisconsin's Public Gardens

– Well, my name is Mark Konlock, I’m the director of horticulture at Green Bay Botanical Garden. Has anybody been to Green Bay Botanical Garden? All right, almost everybody, awesome. That’s great, and I hope you’ve been to a lot of these other gardens, so feel free, and maybe the first couple I’ll be like, “Raise your hand if you’ve been there,” so we can get a gauge of everyone that’s been to some of these other great gardens throughout the state. I wasn’t able to get like, everyone, but I got a fair amount of gardens. So I’ll also have to go a little bit fast to get this in the amount of time, because there’s 13 different gardens we’re gonna kinda peruse, so first, a couple things. This is not this kind of a trippin’ event. [audience laughing] Also, before you go on your road trip, you wanna have a hearty breakfast, wanna get your vehicle in order, perhaps the Green Mobile here. You wanna have your itinerary, we’re gonna start out at West of the Lake Garden in Manitowoc, head over to the Sheboygan area. We’re gonna go down to Milwaukee area, Boerner Botanical, Rotary in Janesville, up to Madison to a number of gardens, over to Wausau quick. I think we’re also going back to Oshkosh, and then to Green Bay Botanical Garden at the end.

So we’re gonna speedball. And also take the road less traveled. This is kind of an interesting hotel of remnants and ruins, so check out some of the different things along the roadside there. This is Maribel Caves Hotel; and also, final thing, take a interesting travel companion. This is my girlfriend Jacqueline, hamming it up for the camera. That can make all the difference in a road trip, right, your companions. So West of the Lake Gardens, that is in Manitowoc, Wisconsin, Don Cisler, director of horticulture, is here in the crowd. It’s a great garden, and the other thing I was gonna do in a lot of my talks, or the gardens we visit, is tell a little bit about some of the newer things that I’ve noticed in the last year. So they have this parking lot expansion, kind of a cool idea here, right, to use brick to mark the handicap sites and everything. Kind of like this ’cause there’s a different colored pavement marker.

So the other thing I’ll do is give you some ideas of things you can bring to your own yard. This is Zinnia Zahara Starlight Rose, I believe. A giant mass planting, it was like alive with pollinators. And they have these really cool fuchsia baskets, so it’s a really neat idea of how to bring a ginormous specimen plant to your yard with these big chains hanging up. I really love that fuchsia collection that they have here at West of the Lake Gardens. This is kind of a funky planter I like. It’s kind of almost like an espaliered flat planter of begonias here along the wall of the building. This little garden area I have a lot of shots of, so I’m just gonna kinda go through ’em. I like it ’cause it’s more of a landscape size area that you’d see your own back patio or backyard, so you can get some plant ideas of what you might do. And that furniture really makes it, it’s very, it’s actually comfortable to sit on that stuff.

And the cool thing, a lot of gardens have colored furniture as a way to stand out in your garden. So it’s just like painting something a different color than you might normally think can really make a difference in the landscape. There’s a conifer garden here, it’s really interesting to see all these different textures and colors of conifers. Kind of like a small, little thing that you can do in your yard with just, you know, five different conifers. Make it a little different area that has that good color. And the great thing about it, it’s winter interest, it’s all year long winter interest. Think about putting something outside your window where you’re actually gonna see it all winter. Not like way in the back part of your yard, where it’s too cold to even walk out to. They have a great rose garden here with hybrid tea roses. And I believe they’re treated as annual, so they’re taken out every year, which is kind of a cool thing if you can afford to do that, hey, then you just have to, boom, pull ’em out, throw ’em away, start fresh next year.

Here’s Jacqueline, color echoing the planting scheme. I think she did that on purpose with her dress selection. But another good point when road tripping, remember to wear sunscreen, remember to wear your hat to protect your face. The beds here at West of the Lake are just amazing with all these annuals that they do in these huge masses, so that might not be something you can do at your own place, but it’s a place where you can come and visit this and then not have to do all that work. And with kind of cardinal and white color scheme here, Wisconsin Badgers, and if you look on the Lake Michigan there, there’s the S. S. Badger making its way across kind of in the middle of the screen there. So here’s some more shots, just the beautiful color pallette and the amount of annuals. I had to put this picture in there, ’cause it reminded me of the movie Crocodile Dundee, remember it was like, “You think that’s a knife, this is a knife!” Well, you think you have a watering wand, that’s a wandering wand right there, holy cats! You need two hands for that thing! Get way back in the beds with that guy. So that’s kind of an interesting thing, ’cause I assume you, right, you don’t have to step into the beds, you can just put the wand way back in there.

Yeah, just, I’m gonna have to go through these guys faster than I am probably. There’s the beautiful borrowed view of Lake Michigan, too. Love the lake and love how you can look out over it, and I always like to pretend that I own this house [laughs] when I go here, Tom probably does when he works here, right? Another little idea from here is the hardscaping with the rocks, you know, the pattern-colored rocks instead of, say, a paver or a brick or something that might be maybe more expensive. But you can do these different patterns, and they also have these really cool succulents here in the, kinda like a birdbath elevated. I like that idea, ’cause a lot of those succulents have that cool texture, you know, they look, but if they’re on the ground, you really don’t get to see ’em so much, so it’s a way to elevate ’em to your eyeball level to appreciate the succulents more. Here’s some more succulents, here’s like the rocks, again, you can see, making patterns that you could do in your own yard easily, more contemporary look almost. Yeah, here’s, it’s really, that swoop Nike symbol almost looking thing, and then they have these really cool greenhouses with different succulents, cacti and things like that that you can kind of look into and see the whole collection. So that’s another aspect of West of the Lake. Also, free admission, so if you’re going there, it’s a little, great stepping stone to Door County or Green Bay or wherever, where you can stop in, take a break, have awesome bathrooms, always look for that in a botanical garden. [audience laughing] Great bathrooms there, as well, they usually have a person greeting you, too, it’s really nice.

All right, Christopher Farms and Gardens. This is a private garden, actually, so not a public garden, but I wanted to zoom through it quick, because you can go to this thing called June-A-Palooza and get access to that garden. It’s in Sheboygan, again, on the lake. Christopher Farms and Gardens. I’ll go through it pretty fast, ’cause you have to go to June-A-Palooza or another event. June-A-Palooza is a fundraiser for Meals On Wheels of Sheboygan County, so it’s a really great event, and Jay Christopher is one of the co-founders of the Pampered Chef. So he has these really great vegetable gardens, preserving honeybees, he has a lot of great water features there on the property. This is the slide I always like to say with ornamental plants and native plants. You know, “Can’t we all just get along?” The unicorn and the mallard, together in perfect harmony, floating forward to a bright future. Labyrinth Garden, they have this little labyrinth garden, which is kind of a contemplative spot there.

There’s this really nice water features like I mentioned before, it’s a great place for entertaining and events and things. Jay also has this greenhouse here with succulents and other tropical plants. It’s a really giant property, there’s talk of, I’ve heard of it becoming a public garden, and it would make it the largest in the state of Wisconsin. I’m pretty sure it’s around 60 acres. Really, the thing you notice here from a design perspective is the masses and repetition of similar plants. That’s one of the things I noted kinda walking around there. Another pond by the house, and then again, the borrowed view of Lake Michigan and this prairie planting here. Great Lake on a great state, great state on a Great Lake, whatever that saying used to be [laughs], and then there’s the, a lotta interesting little sculptures here, too. I always liked this, ’cause I [audience laughing] wanted to do this at Green Bay Botanical on our belvedere, the Cialis commercial, man! [audience laughing] I thought it would be a great photo, selfie station thing, but we never pulled it off, but they did at Christopher Farms and Gardens, so they beat us to the punch. Then, they have a pretty nice little Japanese garden.

I don’t have the best shots of it, but it has a little tea house and everything, too. Kind of a corn crib, grow some vines up there maybe. And then, they have this amphitheater, outdoor amphitheater entertainment space, so for that event, you kind of end up there for dinner and a concert. And then, one of the newer additions is this huge hosta garden I think they call like Jay-rastic Park, where there’s a ton of huge hostas and these crazy sculptures, Velociraptor. And this is the event, then, that you could actually get access to this garden to view it, even though it is a private garden, so they have their website, if you just Google that, you can get there. Bookworm Gardens, I’m a sure a lot of people have been there, it’s really cool. It’s a smaller garden, it has all these little kinda pocket gardens going with different books. I thought this was a cool hardscape idea, where they put the little colored pebbles and stones into the concrete, something you could do at home, too. The bears, three bears, and this area here gives you a good idea for like an outdoor kitchen space. It has the ruin look to it, so you only have half of the hardscape costs.

[audience laughing] And then, it has some really good amenities of the storage, the cooking space, you know, the coffee machine and everything out here, so I think that’s a cool example for an outdoor kitchen. Lot of cool, you know, garden areas and things. They have a newer bridge that connects some of the routes that used to be dead ends, which I didn’t put a picture in of. Bookworm, great place, Kohler, these water towers, I always think they’re like the War of the Worlds aliens. Like just the way they’re built, every time I’m like, “What’s up with those things?” But the village of Kohler is actually a botanical garden, a PGA-certified botanical garden, 2004. So if you go there, check it out, if you go to the shops, if you go to Lodge Kohler, Whistling Straits, whatever, they have some pretty cool sculptures intersprinkled with all the plantings, great tropical plantings in their containers and around the different buildings. Just really nice horticulture work, so it’s a great place to check out the plants when you’re out there doing other things in Kohler. Have a little shot of the Domes, you know? Check those out, it’s a great time of the year. It’s winter, it’s cold, that’s why you’re here, hopefully, to see all these colorful images. I just have a couple shots of the desert dome and the tropical dome, and there’s the show dome, the sausage tree, perfect for the city of Milwaukee, get your bratwurst here.

[audience laughing] Just kidding [laughs]. There’s also a really great garden called Lynden Sculpture Garden, which I didn’t put any slides for this. Like right north of Milwaukee on Brown Deer Road, which I couldn’t even find my pictures from, ’cause they’re so unorganized. Boerner Botanical Gardens, great place. It’s one of like, I’d say, the big four gardens, you know? Boerner, Olbrich, Rotary, Green Bay Botanical, maybe. So they have some really great annual plantings. Great bulbs, they’ve really been getting into that more. This is a great picture I like with the bold texture of that dark alocasia with kind of, looks like a coreopsis. That fine texture contrasting in this large garden space. So it just shows you don’t need a lot of plants to like have an impact in a planting.

And this is kinda cool, ’cause it’s this sedge here with the lantana and the petunia, and it kinda like builds in the fall interest. So I noticed that at a fair amount of places, and that’s something we do at Green Bay is like we kinda build in some of the fall interest in our annual beds, so we don’t have to flop ’em out with mums and kale and asters and things like that. So you can kinda try to incorporate that from the start of your planting. Here’s the Allium schubertii where they left up that allium foliage to give you that cool texture into the later summer months. Just a bold, crazy, tropical planting. We’re kind of taking a spin through the garden. Here’s this where they’re using a spider plant. So you could use an interiorscape plant in your plantings to give you different textures, maybe use some different plants that you usually use inside, outside, and they’re easy to propagate, right, so you can save some money. Cool use of a giant aloe specimen in their perennial garden. Just something you could do in your own yard if you have something that you’d like to overwinter and bring inside.

You could kinda throw it outside for the summer months, give it a little more light. This rock garden quarry area that kinda leads into a shade garden here. And one of the things that all gardens, you know, as they age, sometimes you have to think about renovating and changing ’em and doing things. So what they’ve done in this garden is taken out a fair amount of some of these older birch trees that were starting to decline just kind of from age to open up the space, so then of course, it become more sunny. But it’s just something that you sometimes have to do. You have to bite the bullet and change areas that, you know, have grown older. Here’s a cool idea, a do-it-yourself project, that they use the stumps to create this little patio area here. And the other thing I saw in a different DIY thing was, you know, instead of having to do the whole excavation of a patio, you can just throw the stone on top of the ground, throw some gravel or sand in between, and just like use it immediately, and have a little short-time patio, pop-up patio even, what? [audience laughing] Little succulent containers here, you can see that’s a big thing, you know, where you just have these succulents. You hardly have to take care of ’em. And then in the background, you can see the China Lights display being set up, so we’re gonna take a little spin through that, because a lotta gardens have to have special events and things to raise money to generate revenue to keep their staff on board, et cetera, et cetera.

Here’s a use of some of these other plants, begonias, annuals, amongst your shade garden. Sometimes it’s hard to get color into a shade garden, so think about using some annual plants in there. You know, you’ll have to water ’em and take care of ’em a little more, but you can get those pops of color in a shade garden. The rose garden at Boerner, you know, they have a pretty substantial rose garden, so that’s worth checking out. This is one of their wedding sites there, all the tropicals and all their annual plants in the back of the building. The only kind of rabbit you like in your garden. [audience laughing] It’s like Medusa saw that thing, it’s cast in stone. And they have a really nice herb garden, too, at Boerner. I really like that Peggy does their herb garden, this was a cool combination, the color echoing of the salvia and the acidanthera, the ornamental pepper at the base, kind of a little geometric triangle pattern there. And it changes every year, of course.

They had a little pop-up fairy garden there, it was really nice. My mom’s in some of these pictures here. She’s usually walking away from me. Not sure what that means exactly, [audience laughing] but [laughs], ’cause I’m taking pictures, she’s like, “I’m moving on. ” The boardwalk that they have here, it kind of goes to back here, and then they have big cistern. This has grown up a lot from this picture, but they had this rainwater harvesting system there which is kinda neat to see. It’s grown a lot from these pictures. And the final thing is they do some trialing at Boerner there, so this is the American Rose Trials for Sustainability. They do a lot of trialing for All-American Selections and then different breeding companies. So it’s a great place to go in this little, I think it’s two and a half acre area to get some ideas of newer plants that are coming out on the market.

So this is Wicked Witch, which is a newer one come in the last couple years, and then I really like this one for some reason at the moment. Took the picture, it caught my eye. And then this is China Lights, which is one of their big fundraisers, they’ve done it for, I think, three or four years now, but I’m just gonna give you a little sneak peek of it during the day and then kinda transgressing into the night here. So it’s definitely something to go check out, it’s usually in September, sometimes into October a little bit. – Audience Member: Where is this at? – This in Milwaukee, Hales Corners. [audience chatting] All right, so now, we’re gonna head over to Rotary Botanical Gardens in Janesville. I’m sure a lot of you are familiar with it. It’s a great place, they use a huge amount of annuals there. So that’s the big showstopper for them. I think Mark said he does about, or they used to have about 150,000 annuals that they’d put in.

So one thing about this is it takes a while to put all those in there, so think about visiting in July maybe, when they’ve had a chance to get established and everything. They also have some spring blooms, which you’ll see here. And you can see how they have these kind of tours, these different sculptural elements to give you some different bold texture and contrast with all the plants. Here’s their spring display, so they have these bulbs bouqueted here, which is a different way to plant ’em, just dig a hole and kinda like chuck a handful of 50 in there. [audience laughing] This is one of my favorite ones, this Sensual Touch tulip. It’s like a peony tulip with fringed petalage, so it’s kind of something different. And I always liked this idea where you have like, a little display of what’s in bloom. We’ve always tried to do that at our garden, but haven’t gotten around to it for some reason. And then Mark has, and Mark and now Mike, have all these really cool displays in their containers. This giant alocasia.

[audience murmuring] It’s huge. And another great thing about visiting all these gardens is it gives you a opportunity to take cool photographs if you’re a photographer. You’ll see a lot of pictures further out of people taking pictures. And the other cool thing at Rotary is like these little art projects they do with high schoolers or kids where they give ’em a plywood dragonfly, and they have ’em decorate it, and then they have it throughout the grounds and sell ’em off, you know, to make profit for the garden. This is a interesting idea of a screen or a hedge, you know? You could use a grass instead of a shrub, you know? It’s gonna take it a while to grow throughout the season, but it’s just a different way to screen an area. I like this planting here of just the yucca in the container is simple, I call this simple elegance. And they have a really amazing Japanese garden. As far as I know, I think it’s the only one in the state of Wisconsin, and it’s pretty amazing, especially in the spring here. You can see these redbuds in bloom. You can see the use of the manicured plant materials, the different elements of the Japanese garden, the lanterns and things, the water feature.

And this shows you just how you can use one plant to affect the ferns here or the ginger in this picture. You know, a mass of one plant can be very effective in a landscape, you don’t have to have all this other random stuff necessarily. The gravel garden, so Janesville, there’s so much to see in the springtime with this garden, right, and the bulbs they have, and then come back and see all the annuals later on in the season. This picture here shows you something kind of interesting. I call it, it’s like the color echoing between the structure, the paint on that structure, and then the biological Japanese maple there, so it’s a very, I think it’s a really nice design feature there with the building mirroring the plant material colors. Something you could do in your own yard pretty easily. I mean, you could just throw a bench in there. And then, here’s some more of the glorious annuals exploding throughout the grounds. Just all these different riots of color and texture. It’s a pretty spectacular place to go.

Then, this garden here has always this kinda blue-white color theme, so it kinda contrasts with some of the other areas. Again, the furniture, throw a little piece of furniture in there that stands out, makes it kinda be its own element. The use of statuary garden art in there. Just one subtle sculpture can make a difference in a garden. This is their sunken garden, which is a wedding site. And this hedge always gets eaten by deer, too, so it’s kind of like a pleached hedge, almost, by the deer. The popcorn plant, you probably have heard of this or smelled it, you know, kinda smells like popcorn. So one thing I like how they put it next to the pathway, so that it’s not like way back in the garden bed and you have to try to like trample through there. Putting those plants with the fragrance and things like that really close to where you’re actually gonna interact with ’em so that you do interact with ’em. Random sculpture thrown in there.

And then, this is the newer wellness garden where it’s just a huge amount of color. This is image is neat, I think, ’cause it shows the contrast of all the madness of color on the edges and then that simple planting in the middle of it. So I kinda like that contrast of that. I have a lot of pictures of this from last year and a previous year I saw it, so I’ll kinda go through. And this is a giant castor bean. And then, here’s some of the, again, like that kind of fall color scheme almost mixed in there. I really like this combination, it’s just like a celosia cockscomb with this white gomphrena. It just was very simple but very, boom! It really stands out a lot, has those Christmas colors of red and green, which we don’t think as, you know, using in our plantings as much in the summer months, but it’s great across the color wheel, contrast, complementary. Giant cardoon in there, the eyeball plant, you know? Kind of a simple thing that you see for sale with the Agastache, looks pretty good. Then, this guy’s getting right up in there with his camera! So look at all the, he’s probably going crazy with all these photograph opportunities here.

And then, they have this undersea garden, which I think has been decommissioned maybe, but it’s kind of a funky thing. It’s like you were in a living aquarium. All right, then, they had these different gardens with countries, so I learned something. This is the Russian garden, and then they also have a huge light show, so they were starting to set it all up into September even. So it’s kinda crazy like, you know, just all the effort that goes into the different light shows and exhibits and things the gardens have. So you know, you’ll think of ’em as a garden, but don’t forget about all the other events and things that they have that are interesting parts of a visit. Yeah, I found this random little skull hanging out there. So that was different. [audience laughing] No, just kidding, it was cool, it was the Day of the Dead for Mexico. All right, Allen Centennial Gardens, up to Madison.

This is a great little garden on the campus of UW-Madison. Ben Futa’s been doing a lot of great things there with his staff, they have this kind of Dutch wave style garden that is outside. And it’s 30 years old, so they’re celebrating that. These are some crazy containers that they used to have back in the day with just this specimen, so you can see where like a similar material container with different specimens can be a great planting in a garden. And I really like what they do at Allen is like activating the space with these different events and partnerships and things like that. A lot of times a garden is almost like a backdrop for different events or things that are going on in your life. So think about how you can use that garden that way. They have these really great signs, too. I like that ’cause it kinda shows you and tells you and educates you without having to have a person there or a docent there. So they did some air spading around this, and then they planted, it looks like, some sedge around there, and I saw a lot of that at Olbrich, too, where you have kind of like a living mulch of these sedges or grasses and things around the base of your tree, so you don’t have to mow close to them and damage the roots either.

They have this really great gravel alpine garden. I’d say that one’s the best in the state of Wisconsin with the spine of these rocks put up like this and all these great little alpine plants. The hypertufa troughs, I like this idea of where you can just have your hypertufa out into the garden and maybe overwinter it somewhere in garage or do something else with it. But then, you can just plop it out there in your garden. You could do the same thing with something that you might overwinter, you know? Instead of replanting it, just find a little spot for it in your yard. Great little combination here of rattlesnake master and Verbena bonariensis, so a self-seeding annual with a native plant. There’s this little kitchen garden area. The swan plants, lot of people’s favorite plants. At our garden, they love that thing. This looks like Hibiscus Amaranth or some other cultivar.

And then, I found this little area last year that I liked. It was kind of almost like a little, I don’t know, I’d call it like a Islamic chapel little area with that design, but it had this container here with these floating flowers, so I thought that was a cool idea. I’ve seen it at Chanticleer, too, where the interns would do a little display in there. That’s like a way that you could take your flowers or daylilies especially, they only last a day, and kind of have a way to showcase them, and do a little floral display with the plants in your garden, you know, almost every day or every week in your garden. Obviously, that thing has to hold water [laughs], but there are a lot of pots like that. And then, this is gonna be a new garden there. So I saw the signage and thought I would share that with you to come and check that out. This garden, again, is free, you can just walk onto it, if you’re at the campus of Madison or in the area. Rock chopped in half, just wanted to throw that in there. And then, the fire hydrant, contrasting color combination of red and green.

Olbrich Botanical Garden, Jeff Epping is here in the crowd, director of horticulture. Amazing garden, right, it’s spectacular. They have all these great containers. I really like this sense of arrival and entry when you get there with all the containers. And I like, this is really interesting how they used the logs, the birch things. We do that at our garden, too, we scavenge random materials, you know, so if you have to remove a tree or something, think about saving a piece of it to add to your container design. This is the Frautschi, I wanna say, Learning Center that’s gonna be completed this year, so that’s a new thing to come check out at Olbrich Botanical Gardens. It was under construction when I went there. So I always enjoy seeing how things are getting built and what’s happening around there, how you’re trying to protect this tree. There’s great information about monarchs, and the Bolz Conservatory has a butterfly exhibit that I’m sure a lot of you are familiar with, and if you’re not, come check that out.

Here’s more shots of the construction, so that is gonna be exciting to see the finished product of that. And you can see all the things that you have to do as the horticulture staff to work around that and figure out what you’re gonna save, what you’re gonna not be able to save, and how you’re gonna replant it, so that’s always exciting. The succulents, you can see that’s a trend. Succulents everywhere! I really like this planting here, ’cause it’s more of a contemporary thing. It’s simple elegance with just a couple things: the boxwoods and the hack mat grass, but it looks really nice with just those two things combined with that sculpture. They have great interpretive signs at Olbrich, so you’ll be able to find your way back to the Visitor’s Center. Yeah, and then, Olbrich has this event called GLEAM, which is an outdoor night light exhibit. So it’s not a holiday thing, but it’s in like Septemberish, Octoberish, right, Jeff? So they have different artists install lights, and then you go and interact with the garden at night, so it’s a different way to see that space, and last year it had neon. Kind of a crazy thing at Olbrich is this hedge was overgrown, so they had to remove it. So every time, just like we said at Boerner, as our gardens are getting older, we have to revitalize ’em, renovate ’em.

So what they did with the old parts of the Cornus mas hedge was incorporate ’em into their design. So that was kinda funky, the bromeliad’s used here. You can see this photographer, again, he’s getting up in there, getting his shot, and this was from a previous year was this water cauldron fountain. The sunken garden at Olbrich. These are some old pictures I found, ’cause I was like, “I need more pictures of Olbrich,” and I think is like from 2012 or something like that, but it’s kinda neat to see how you use those sculptures or an art element in a garden. There’s another shot, and then Olbrich is kinda getting famous for these gravel gardens. And at their booth at Olbrich, they can explain it a lot better than I can. But in essence, you have like four or five inches of angular gravel that you put down, and then you take your perennial, and then you move the gravel aside and plant the base of the perennial touching the soil, and then the gravel becomes your mulch. So the idea is that weed seeds that fall on top, the first thing that comes out is the radical, the root, it can’t, it germinates, the root grows, but it never gets to the soil, so then the weed seed dies, so it never really can get established. So the idea is that you don’t have to do so much weeding, which is a good thing, right, and then the thing you have to do maintenance-wise is in the springtime, clean up the dead debris and foliage and not let it make a layer of compost on top, because then the weed seeds could grow in there.

So that’s my take of it, but Jeff can tell you a lot better what it’s all about, but they have this really great garden there, and there’s a lot of gravel gardens there, so it’s an interesting way to think about changing your landscape. And you can see here, this is just showing the same area but how it changes throughout the season. And celebrating the seed deaths, I call this celebrating senescence, or the death of the plant or its lifecycle. So here’s just a bunch of different shots. Again, the furniture! And then this area here just shows you, again, a simple planting that has a lot of effect with the different textures and contrasts of the arborvitae with the prairie dropseed or sedge. And then, they have a really great herb garden here, too. You can see where their staff has made these really neat willow fences and sculptures. The birdhouse gourd, this little parterre garden, something you could do in your own yard. The artichoke, the pawpaw, largest tree fruit native to the United States, love that thing. And then, I came across this little kinda like back area at Olbrich last year that I really found intriguing, where I don’t know, it made me think of like a little Edwardian case or something like that.

But it was just a bunch of like random rocks, bricks, plants, things off to the side, so I thought that was kind of like a cool little niche vignette thing that a person could do in their own yard pretty easily, and it looks really neat. And here’s, again, the use of these different sedges and grasses kind of underneath the roots of a tree, so you don’t have to mow around it, it kind of adds habitat. Largest scale of it, the Thai Pavilion, that’s an amazing, the only one in the United States, it’s spectacular just to see that and all the tropical plants around it. Here’s some of these humongous elephant ears and other tropicals, castor beans, it gives you ideas of what you could do that’s pretty amazing. But the other great thing is you don’t have to do all the work, you just come to the public garden and enjoy it, go get lunch, relax, you know? Wisconsin is really blessed in our public gardens. The rose garden here is more of a contemporary rose garden with a lot of perennials and shrub roses mixed in there. I really love these planting pockets where you leave space in a hardscape for some plant materials to soften it. So that, again, something that a person could do themselves. Succulents. Here’s again, the use of a specimen plant in a container, just one simple thing makes a big difference, and it’s a plant that you can, then, overwinter in your house.

You know, this garden here I think is amazing. But what I like to think about is instead of a fire pit, how ’bout a planting pit, huh, in the middle of your hardscape, planting pit. They have something like that at the Arboretum, too. Then, there’s this container garden where they’re sunk right into the water feature. And the conservatory, I just have a couple shots so you don’t forget about that, especially in the winter months. If you want a place to go to get rejuvenated, to see some greenery, check out the Bolz Conservatory. There’s the butterfly show, you know, in the summer months. Here’s some of our staff contemplating life. [audience laughing] The attack frog of the education department! I don’t know what it is, I just saw the sign, I thought it was crazy. [audience laughing] Yeah, and then, the University of Wisconsin-Madison has a lot of little landscaped areas, pocket gardens.

We found this botany garden that had been revitalized, I think, in the last number of years. So it’s just right on campus, kind of by Chamberlin Hall on University, and it’s kind of laid out by family. But it had really nice hardscape elements, sculptural elements, had some annuals thrown in there, and then it has a teaching side to it with the families of plant materials, magnolia seed. Supposedly, a tree grafted from Sir Isaac Newton’s apple that fell on his head, so I was hoping to be enlightened. [audience laughing] I think it did more damage than good. And then, this is an interesting little staircase there where it’s like these concrete steppers. The Carillon Tower, swing by that if you’re walking around campus, has a really nice little annual planting. And then, this was a funky new addition thing that I thought would be great for growing hops. And then, there’s the west, you know, West Ag Station in Madison, too, on the west side of town, kind of south of the beltline. It’s kind of a trial garden, so you can get ideas of new plants coming out on the market.

All right, now, we’re headed back north to Sheboygan. Paine Art Center and Gardens, Oshkosh, my bad, Oshkosh, yes. We’ve already been there, we’re going to Oshkosh. So I mean, they have a great display of spring bulbs, and they’ve been adding different displays to the newer buildings, and if you’ve been there in the last years, you know that they have the sunken garden. And then, they’re working on some other gardens, that parking lot expansion, and there’s kind of like a white garden, so these are just some cool combinations. Here’s the sunken garden, this was the tulip display last year, I think. I really like the color combination that Sheila Glaske picked there. The problem when I went there was these double-flowering peony tulips get so heavy, and they had a rainstorm, and they just all flopped to the ground unfortunately, but the combination chosen was great, ’cause the color echoed the brick and the other hardscape elements, so it was a really great selection. They have some awesome container plantings, the bathroom! [audience laughing] Hello, bringing the flowers in, that’s just a really great little bouquet to greet you in the restroom facility. Again, simple elegance, this is a nice combination where this magnolia color echoes the crabapple blossom.

So when you’re picking your individual plants, make sure you think about those things like when does it bloom, what’s the exact color, can you make some of these little combinations in your designs? And then, now, we’re there at summer. Here’s the newer garden area, I think this was just this summer where it was just recently planted with the Allium Millenium on this campus. This is kind of like a soft, pastel garden, and it’s adjacent to this kinda wedding area. It’s a little bit past there, and this was the sunken garden this year, and this is, again, that idea of like these colors are very autumnal, so they’re kind of building that interest for summer and fall so they don’t have to switch everything out. And the different texture of the grasses intersprinkled in there, random little angel figurines were kinda like tucked away, so a little thing for people to find or kids even. Another great container planting. I like these closeup shots of some of these giant leaves like this. This is a neat idea. It’s a dragonfly made out out of containers, so that was in the children’s area there. Some ornamental edibles that they have in the back area.

Some butterflies hanging out there. All right, now, we’re gonna head up to Monk Gardens quick. This is kind of a garden under construction. It’s like one of the youngest public gardens. So I think they’re hiring a director of horticulture, if anybody wants a job up there. It’s paying pretty good, actually. Check it out, a PGA, it’s in Wausau. It’s kind of on the north-ish side of Wausau, Wisconsin. Yeah, so like I said, it’s still really being built, but one of the things they do have is this really nice pavilion, it has the restroom facilities, it’s a rental space for outdoor activities. We had a a little garden group that went up there.

They catered it in, but they also have this wood-burning pizza area, so that’s kinda neat. And the other thing I noticed is they have really great partnership with the Hmong community up there. There was a lot of Hmong gardeners there, so they’re trying to build bridges between their communities and show the vegetable growing skills and tradition of the Hmong that were taking care of this garden there and that’s prevalent in their community. Then they had this area here that’s gonna become a hosta garden, so that’s under construction. You can see this, right now, is just a chunk of woods that will become a hosta garden. In the background of this, you can see this area here, that little tree house area, that’s one of their more developed structures on the property right now. So if you’re in Wausau, I mean, the Monk gardens still has a lot of work to do, it’s worth stopping by, but check out the Yawkey Woodson Art Museum when you’re there, ’cause they have a really great display. When we were there, they had this display of birds and like the personality of birds, so it wasn’t just like a little anatomically correct bird. It was like images of the essence of the bird. So this one is the essence of the goose, and that one seemed really accurate to me.

[audience laughing] It’s hissing and [mimics goose] attacking you. And then, this was a very sad one, yeah. Now, Green Bay Botanical Garden, all right. So you know you like to talk about your garden more than anybody else’s, so just kidding! We’re running out of time, but we’re doing good. Wanna welcome to you to, if you come up to Lambeau or anything else, make sure you come by Green Bay Botanical Garden. This is like intersprinkling some of our new things, this monument sign we’re excited about to get people in. And we’re a little crazy at our botanical garden, but all of our gardens really rely on their staff, interns, volunteers to make it go. It takes a huge amount of people and dedication of everyone to make these organizations go and all of you, who are members and volunteers and to help promote them by going to events and things are so important. ‘Cause we’re pretty rich in the state of Wisconsin in terms of botanical gardens, I would say. So here’s a little bit of our spring garden.

We put a lot of emphasis on our spring garden in a lot of events, and we have over 300,000 spring-blooming bulbs. We think it’s one of the largest displays in the state. What we do is we plant our bulbs and our annuals in front of our structures, and then we actually take ’em out of the ground, dry ’em, and reuse ’em amongst the perennials the next fall. So we’ve been saving them since 2006. Yeah, so this is just kind of a little tour through the garden, this combo I really like. It’s the Fritillaria imperialis Lutea Maxima, that Fritillaria, that tall, yellow guy. And then, below it’s Tahiti Daffodil. And then, we have grape hyacinth there, too. A lot of bulbs are just like ground cover almost, so this kinda elevates the floral display above, then color echoes down and they bloom at the similar time. Here’s where we’ve intersprinkled the bulbs amongst the perennials.

And then, our newer gardens, this was actually built in 2010, the King Shade Garden. We actually, now, will design the bulbs into the garden and plant ’em that fall. So we put 11,000 daffodils into this garden. And then, our new Grand Garden, I think we put almost, I wanna say, 33,000 miniature daffodils and grape hyacinth. This is Dennis Ledvina, magnolia hybridizer, international extraordinaire, who’s passed away now. But he’s donated a huge amount of magnolias to our garden, so we have those blooming, as well. And we’re actually a nationally-recognized collection of magnolias, so it’s the only PCN garden in the state of Wisconsin, and strangely, it’s for magnolias, which is kind of random. So hopefully, you come and visit us. Hopefully, you know, these guys, hopefully, they’re just looking at where to go next at the garden and not just on their phones, there’s a lot to see. But these are some of our events we have.

It’s really great, because we actually practically give away our garden for free. It’s free admission for moms on Mother’s Day, and free admission for everyone on National Public Gardens Week that Friday. But we’re doing a lot of other things. We have our summer displays, we’re renovating our parking lot, we added a new sidewalk to get more parking for our concert series. And then, we take everything we learn from all the other gardens that we visited, just like you do, and bring it to our backyard, Green Bay Botanical Garden, so we have a lot of tropical and annual displays. We do about 20,000 annuals, so not nearly as much as some other places, but we kind of strategically place ’em amongst our perennials and shrubs and trees and things. So we have, you know, this lily here, this Orienpet lily, where it’s color echoing the castor bean. Some crazy stuff here. The canna, this Angel Wings dusty miller was a newer thing the last couple years. And we have a lot of native plants incorporated into our gardens now, too.

So it’s a way to show natives, nativars, other pollinator-attracting plants together in happy harmony. Rattlesnake master with Agastache foeniculum. And then, there’s the daylily in the back, Rocket City daylily, so that’s your ornamental plant kind of mixed with your natives. And then, here’s our tropical display beds in front of our structures, again, our annual display beds. We have an herb garden, as well, with this parterre garden here. Color foliage garden, Dutchman’s pipe. We have a really nice cottage garden. Selfie station, up-and-coming thing. We’ve also been adding a lot of sculptures to the garden over the last number of years to just have a different element for everyone that visits. Caladium with heuchera, a new sculpture installation that just was installed toward the end of the year last year, our upper rose garden.

We have hybrid teas, grandiflora, floribundas, David Austin English roses up in there. This is Rainbow Sorbet, which is one of my favorites. It’s really disease-tolerant with those glossy leaves. Our Lusthaus got hit by a cottonwood tree last year, so we had to reroof that guy, luckily, no one was injured. Kress Oval Garden, the belvedere in a tropical paradise. We have a daylily repository, where we work with American Hemerocallis Society, the Hosta Society, they have display gardens at Green Bay Botanical. We had this Nature Connects: Art with Lego exhibit two years ago, 2018, and then in 2021, we’re gonna bring this exhibit called Washed Ashore, which is art with plastic scavenged from the ocean. Yeah, so it’s gonna be pretty exciting. There’ll be, I think it’s eight sculptures made out of plastic, and the exciting thing is that we’re gonna, they’re all from the ocean, but we’re gonna get one commission that’ll be a sturgeon, a lake sturgeon, from Great Lakes garbage. So it’ll be the unveiling of Stanley the Sturgeon! Come and see him, 2021, Green Bay Botanical! This is kind of a cool idea you could do with wood cookies, you know, where you chop up a tree, we made a little path of ’em.

It’s decomposed now over, say, five years, but we kinda reused all these little wood cookies to make a path in our Children’s Garden. Bathroom of the Children’s Garden, the Hobbit House, won the second best bathroom in the United States in this contest. [audience laughing] Yeah. We talked about making our toilet seats gold like “My Precious,” but we didn’t get around to doing that [laughs]. [audience laughing] Spring house ruin of the King Shade Garden. This is a few years after it was installed. It’s grown in a lot since then, and then in fall, it looks pretty spectacular in that King Shade Garden, too. We have this Jenquine Pavilion, which you’ll see in a little bit here, I call this the, you have the Thai Pavilion in Madison, I call this the Amish Pavilion [audience laughing] at Green Bay Botanical Garden. It’s made out of recycled barn timber. It was two barns, and then it became our structure here.

So it used to be a wedding site, but we’ve actually stopped using it as a wedding site, now. And then we have this council ring that looks back to our garden. And then, last year, we had a butterfly exhibit, which we’re gonna have again and reprise this year with butterflies of North America, so that runs June through August, it’s free with admission. So we built it all ourselves, it’s like an in-house exhibit, and then we hatched all these guys from chrysalis. And usually, we get about 300 a week, and they live about two weeks inside here. So there can be, you know, 500, 600 butterflies in that structure surrounding you. And there’s little feeding stations where we let everyone interact with the butterflies. So come check it out, there’s Jacqueline. Same dress, different day. [audience laughing] [Mark laughing] All right, I guess I’m gonna be in trouble for that one probably.

[all laughing] Here’s where we painted this gazebo kind of that Rotary idea to match the maples in the background that change to that color, the Matador maples. They’re kind of like Autumn Blaze, but a different cultivar. So in the fall, there’ll be that little pop where they color echo that. Our Woodland Garden has a new hardscape due to all the weddings down there. And then, I wanna share this with you. The Grand Garden, this is really our newest construction, and we used 11,000 perennials in there of natives, nativars, and pollinator plants, a thousand trees and shrubs, and it’s really coming into its own now that it’s the third year those plants have been in there. It’s an outdoor amphitheater, it’s where we moved all our concerts to, we have a lot of events there. Free concerts for members on Thursdays, and then we have a concert series that’s gonna be Fridays this year. So if you’re like in the neighborhood or stopping up to Door County, think about stopping by there and checking out a concert on your way up. You know, this is kind of a neat shot with all these grasses there, ’cause prairies were really mostly grass.

A New Jersey tea with a little bluestem. The rattlesnake master, one of our favorite plants. It attracts 185 different insects according to Dr. John Hilty at illinoiswildflower. org, I think it is. The Liatris going on, this crazy fasciation, you know, just a natural mutation on this flower. And then, we also have this Matt Schmidt garden, which I don’t think I have a lot of pictures of, but that’s another wedding site at our garden. Another new sculpture, a fountain. Just a random combination with this Dianthus Green Ball. That’s a really funky plant, you know, it’s hard to find it for sale, but it’s just kind of a really funky, interesting texture to add to a container.

Here’s where we have like a little ornamental edible thing with Midnight Snack. [audience awws] Yeah, right, you never know what’s gonna show up at your garden, and we do some trialing, too. We did this trial for American Takii, it was a cut flower trial, we do All-America Selection trialing for ornamentals from seed and vegetative, and then we do the American Rose Trial for Sustainability, too. Some of these things behind the scenes are kind of weird to access, but you can still check out like these in-ground trials, these container ones are kinda behind the scenes. And then, we’re also doing this millennia trial for the Department of Natural Resources to look into the invasiveness of this, ’cause they’re kind of investigating. You know about the NR 40 list of invasive species or restricted prohibited species? Well, they’re looking at some of the millenias as like part of the next phase of that. And yeah, you might come across Sonny, the garden cat, if you get back by us. Here he is again, he was rescued from a compost pile during our Garden of Lights three years ago, and he’s now our official mascot and therapy cat. [audience laughing] Yeah, this is just by our building of random stuff. This is behind the scenes, I took a picture, I don’t know, I thought it looked like eelgrass or something you’d see like in the ocean.

This is our compost pile, look at that, how we beautiful that thing is, it’s amazing! I was gonna say, I was like, well, you know. So in conclusion, before it’s too late, [audience laughing] think about visiting the botanical gardens of the state of Wisconsin, get out your walking stick, get on your kilt and get out there and check ’em out and support ’em, and thank you so much for coming out here, and have a great rest of the day. [audience applauding]