Good news for leaf-peepers: Autumn begins at 4:05 a.m. Friday. The fall foliage will soon be on display. But that nip in the air brings a heightened sense of urgency to friends of the Garfield Park Conservatory, where workers are still hustling to make repairs to greenhouses battered by a monster hail storm June 30.
Tender tropicals like the Flaming Glorybower (native to South Africa) or the King of Tree Philodendron (from Brazil) spent the summer outdoors, but they need to be inside long before cold grips Chicago. Their winter digs, though, are still partially roofless.
The 103-year-old conservatory is one of the biggest attractions on the city’s West Side. Designed by landscape architect Jens Jensen, it’s listed on the National Register of Historic Places and is open every day — and free. But it’s going to take some major fundraising to rebuild the damaged buildings.
Conservatory employees came to work the morning after the storm to find up to 60 percent of the glass panes broken on several greenhouses, including the fern house, where some of the oldest and most valuable plants are housed.
Huge shards of jagged glass were still falling from the ceilings. Workers donned hard hats and Kevlar sleeves and labored under portable plywood shelters as they hurried to save the plants. By 4 p.m. the first day, a shade cloth had been installed over the fern room to shield the exposed plants from direct sunlight.
Contractors worked for weeks to remove broken glass from overhead and underfoot. They picked fragments from among the leaves and fronds and vacuumed them from moss, ferns and soil. Still, pieces of glass turn up every day.
The good news is that the fern room has been successfully winterized, thanks to a temporary polycarbonate roof. Those plants — including rare tree ferns, mosses and cycads — were particularly vulnerable. Some of them are more than 100 years old.
The plants at greatest risk now are the tropicals that are rotated in and out of the display rooms like furniture. It’s not unusual for those plants to spend the warmer months in protected areas outside, much like your dieffenbachia might spend its summer on the patio or porch. But they’re native to climates where temperatures rarely dip below 50 degrees, so they spend their winters in climate-controlled production houses. Cold weather will kill them fast.
Conservatory director Mary Eysenbach says she’s “praying for warm weather” as workers rush to get temporary roofs on those buildings before the end of October.
Once the plants are safely inside, the conservatory can start thinking about permanent repairs. Much of what was lost is outdated. The new roofs, for example, will be made of laminated glass, which can take a beating. A shade-cloth system would allow the conservatory to manage sun exposure better than the old system, which was to whitewash the ceilings.
Normally, the conservatory would have years to design and plan for those upgrades. But five minutes in June turned the project into an emergency, and an expensive one. The cleanup alone will cost about $2 million. The nonprofit Garfield Park Alliance has launched a fundraising campaign called One Pane at a Time; you can find the link at garfieldconservatory.org.
The conservatory is like Disney World for plant enthusiasts, but you don’t need a horticulture degree — or even a green thumb — to love the place, especially on a frigid January afternoon. Just take the Green Line to the tropics. And bring your checkbook.
