Crab apple blossoms will bloom overhead as visitors stroll down an 1890s streetscape festooned with window boxes and hanging plants. “A Stroll Down Crab Tree Lane,” sponsored by the Batavia Plain Dirt Gardeners and Fiskars, a manufacturer of scissors and garden tools, takes you past several shops including a cafe and a green grocer. Amble under an arbor, around an elegant fountain and step into the cozy, secret garden that reveals a wildflower sanctuary. Stroll through the park before the path meanders to a garden shop and conservatory. It is all part of the 2004 Chicago Flower and Garden show’s “Public Places, Private Spaces” theme but with an Illinois wildflower twist.
“It’s a huge undertaking,” says the club’s president Diana Sharp of Batavia. “We’ve been working for weeks building the streetscape. It’s unbelievable. It looks like you’re on a Victorian street.”
Volunteers have spent hours in a suburban warehouse constructing and painting the two-story setting that even includes old-fashioned street pavers. The set will be reconstructed at Navy Pier by opening day, March 13.
Now in its fourth year as a show participant, the club will again use native woodland wildflowers as a staple in this year’s display. “The club has tried to entice people into how they would use native plants in the home garden or in a woodland. This [exhibit] will be more citified,” Sharp says.
The garden club created the Batavia Wildflower Sanctuary and, since 1995, has donated $40,000 from plant sales and garden walks to landscape Batavia’s Riverwalk, a linear park along the Fox River. Club members also adopted nine raised planters around the Riverwalk Activities Center and have planted more than 7,000 native plants.
Almost all of the native plants used in the exhibit were dug from members’ gardens. Besides the Virginia bluebells, which are always a hit, you will find Jack-in-the-pulpit, wild ginger, woodland poppies, great Angelica, columbine, violets, Solomon’s seal, Jacob’s ladder, wild blue phlox, ferns and meadow rue. They are among the many plants dug up in the fall and overwintered in a greenhouse
“Timing is very important,” says club member Lyn Coulthard of Batavia. “Woodland wildflowers are ephemerals. They come out [and bloom] very quickly and we don’t want them to get past their prime.” After a period of cold, the plants are coaxed for a few months in greenhouses at Ball Seed Co. in West Chicago.
Not only will you step back in time at the Plain Dirt Gardener’s exhibit, you also will step into the parallel universe where flowers that only bloom in April will bloom magically alongside August garden stalwarts. “In your own garden that might not happen at the same time,” Sharp says, “but you get that full rich color at the show.”
“A Stroll Down Crab Tree Lane” also features Victorian-style plantings as part of the streetscape.
Daffodils, camassia, grape hyacinths, red twig dogwood, boxwood, viburnum, serviceberry, `Autumn Blaze’ maple and `Summit’ ash will show off alongside old-fashioned Victorian favorites such as bridalwreath spirea, magnolia and a weeping mulberry.
Several garden clubs helped plant window boxes and baskets that will be displayed outside the exhibit’s 19th Century hat shop, sweet shop, clock shop and clothing store. Each establishment’s windows will be decorated with period items. “Our members are lending us their treasures for the exhibit,” Coulthard says.
