Douglas Hoerr’s nightmare is that one weekend you’ll decide to make over your patch of backyard, buy a bunch of plants, and squeeze them in however you can–and later realize that they’re dying, running wild, or just in the way. Then you’ll decide that gardening just isn’t your thing. You wouldn’t redo your kitchen that way, says Hoerr, the principal of Douglas Hoerr Landscape Architecture, and he hopes that after you see Garden in a City–an eight-day show that’s all about designing and planning before you buy–you wouldn’t think of gardening that way either.
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The show, of which Hoerr is the design chairman, is slickly presented. But it’s in a real gardening season, not midwinter, when the plants on display have to be forced. It’s in a realistic place, Butler Field (at Columbus and Monroe, behind the Art Institute, in the megatents that would have housed Art Chicago), where exhibitors can dig their plants, shrubs, and trees right into the ground rather than put them in pots on a concrete floor. Most important–the reason it’s being billed as the first show of its kind–the 40-some exhibits are designed for real urban spaces, particularly those in Chicago: narrow parkways, tiny yards, gangways, decks, balconies. There are seven exhibits on garage roofs alone.
Even though spring is peak landscaping season, twice as many professionals as originally expected are setting up exhibits at the show, whose principal sponsor is Target in partnership with the Park District. “We’re trying to give back to the city,” says Hoerr, “and to a mayor who made what we do for a living a valued part of the landscape instead of the first thing to get value-engineered out.”
Where: Butler Field. Columbus and Monroe
