On any sunny day (and many rainy ones) you’ll find them there, with cameras and binoculars, or clippers and wheelbarrows, holding court or holding hands, sauntering slowly among the flowers or dashing madly across the greens.
The Arboretum lies southeast of the intersection of Florida and Lincoln avenues in south Urbana and boasts as many uses as any educational center on campus. Students of horticulture, crop sciences, fine and applied arts, architecture, landscape architecture, entomology and other biological sciences visit, study and work at the site in the growing season and beyond. The Arboretum’s plants, soils, ponds, birds, buildings and even mosquitoes have been the focus of inquisitive student and faculty research. Its trial gardens (of flowering annuals and perennials, woody plants and grasses) are a draw and a boon to plant growers and breeders around the world, and to the gardens and economies of the county and state.
“I view it as a 57-acre outdoor classroom, a living lab for education and research,” said Arboretum director Bill Kruidenier. “The students are here to learn and there are different ways to learn. The Arboretum is very tactile; it’s very visual, and being able to connect what you learn in the classroom to what you see in the field just makes it that much more real.”
The Arboretum has several formal gardens and others that are naturalistic, such as those of the Frank W. Kari Ponds Restoration, with its native, perennial wetland and upland plants installed in and around two ponds. The site also hosts the Japan House, a display house built in Japan, shipped to Illinois and erected by Japanese carpenters to showcase Japanese art and culture – including furnishings, traditional tea ceremonies, calligraphy, flower arranging, cooking and other art forms. A museum – the Pollinatarium – rounds out the educational offerings. This museum and its garden are devoted to the study and conservation of flowering plants and the insects, birds and bats that pollinate them.
The Arboretum also is an important recreational resource, Kruidenier said.
“Any evening you go there, from the start of school through the first snow, you’ll see students playing Frisbee, soccer or running,” he said. Middle school, high school and UI student athletes and clubs also use the cross-country course, which doubles as a ski track in winter. And every September the Arboretum hosts a weekend of camping in the “nut grove” for 900 Boy Scouts on their Illini Jamboree.
Of the tens of thousands of people who visit each year, the cross-country runners likely get the most comprehensive view of the site. A 2.5-kilometer course starts just south of the 2-acre Miles C Hartley Selections Garden. The runners pass the easternmost of the ponds; go south and then east through a woodland of nut trees at the park’s southern edge; head north up a gentle slope near the Orchard Downs student housing complex and toward the UI president’s house; then west and south again past the Idea Garden and back to their starting point.
Nearly every garden, walkway, educational or cultural feature of the Arboretum is the result of a generous donation, from the $1 million gift to establish the Miles C Hartley Selections Garden (in honor of an Illinois faculty member and alumnus), to the three ponds donated and dug by the Illinois Land Improvement Contractors Association, to the plantings and walkway (in honor of Illinois alumnus Frank W. Kari) installed around those ponds. Dr. Genshitsu Sen and Dr. and Mrs. Luting Liao donated more than 50 cherry trees to the walkway leading to the Japan House. The Master Gardeners of the Champaign County Extension Unit donated the Idea Garden, a showcase of ornamental plants and landscaping ideas. The Illinois Prairie Hosta Society donated and planted a hosta garden. The Noel family donated the Noel Welcome Garden, which is most visible from Lincoln Avenue.
On the second day of autumn 2012, several young couples and families sat or walked around the Hartley garden, a sunken garden that this year featured 1,271 varieties of flowering plants undergoing hardiness and beauty trials. More than 30 companies from around the world provide seeds or plants to the Arboretum for trials at the Hartley. These donors benefit from the detailed growing information gathered there each year.
“The Hartley is one of the premier annual trial sites in the country,” said Arboretum landscape horticulturist Diane Anderson, who planted those 1,271 varieties of plants this year. “There are probably no more than half a dozen trial sites that are as large as ours. We have people coming from all over to see the trials. We do tours from all over the state. People came from everywhere to look and see what they can utilize in their own gardens.”
The summer of 2012 was particularly challenging for the plants – an extended and unusually hot drought baked Central Illinois – with no significant rain falling until September.
Arboretum staff and volunteers had to irrigate the garden significantly more than usual this year, Kruidenier said.
Despite the stress, the garden was awash in leftover summer colors in late September, and several students and non-students were there to take it in.
Ashley Moy, a 21-year-old senior majoring in global studies from Oak Park, Ill., shared a picnic with her boyfriend, Anthony Leung, who came from Chicago to see her.
“I’ve been here three or four times,” she said. “I like to enjoy the atmosphere with my friends. It’s really calming and relaxing. It’s always quiet and serene.”
Kevin Johnson, 21, a senior in electrical engineering from Barrington, Ill., sat on a bench near an arbor with 19-year-old Leah Kling, a sophomore in psychology from McHenry, Ill. Johnson first learned about the Arboretum on a field trip for a vegetable gardening class, but he probably would have discovered it on his own. He and Kling each live in one of the Pennsylvania Avenue Residence halls, about a block away.
“It’s pretty,” Kling said. “I like being out in nature. It calms me down. I have a test on Wednesday. I’m avoiding studying for it.”
Kling said she hoped an outdoor break would make it easier to study.
Meanwhile, broadcast journalism senior Betsy Loeb, 21, focused her camera on the trees. The Lawrenceville, Ill., native said she often visits the Arboretum to complete her videography class work.
“We have a lot of photography assignments and every time I just come here because there’s just a lot of plants, a lot of animals, a lot of bees, a lot of bugs,” she said. “The trees are what I’m working on right now. I’m going to do a fall project.”
Loeb is a fan of the Japan House. She has attended the Japanese tea ceremonies and said she was looking forward to a public viewing of the moon from the well-tended gardens around the house in October.
Peg Steffensen, an Urbana resident and Illinois alumna, walked the gardens with her husband, Dale, a professor emeritus of genetics at Illinois. They came to the Arboretum to escape their hectic retiree lifestyle.
“We’ve had a very busy day,” she said. “I’ve been fighting with a new computer trying to get it to work, with very limited success, and he’s been cleaning out the garage – both horrible chores that spoil your outlook on life. So we thought we’d come over and see the garden.”
Peg Steffensen is a Champaign County Master Gardener and has volunteered in the Idea Garden in previous years. The master gardeners design, plant and maintain the ever-changing exhibits there, as well as a berry patch and rose garden.
The garden offers visitors a sensory-filled educational experience in responsible gardening practices and creative landscaping ideas.
As she talked, Steffensen noticed a cluster of dark purple pepper bushes edging the entrance walkway.
“These new black plants are sort of a trendy thing,” she said. “Actually, I think they’re pretty spectacular. I don’t think they’re very nice, but I love them, sort of. They look very dark. They look sort of artificial. They look sort of evil, but they’re sort of spectacular, the purple and the dark red peppers and the almost black leaves.”
Then she spotted an interloper, a pale green weed standing among the trendy peppers.
“Should I pull it out?” she asked as she extracted it with an expert yank. “It looks too natural for those plants.”
Nearby, 51 children from St. Mathew School’s cross-country track team headed out for a series of half-mile circuits of the Arboretum trail.
“The reason we come here is because it’s a safe environment,” said St. Mathew School’s head coach Greg Rose, after the last batch of runners had loped away. “And the kids get to see the older runners. Everybody runs the same course.
Everybody endures the same amount of discomfort when they run. And a lot of kids see that after high school they can go run for the UI.”
There are other delights for the visitor who comes back again and again. One can witness the changing colors of trees and native plants in autumn, photograph the leafless trees and shrubs in winter, or just stop by for a bit of serenity and beauty, anytime.
“People like to come out to the Arboretum because it’s a nice place to sit and walk and have their wedding and bring their kids,” Anderson said. “I mean, it’s one of the prettiest places in town. And we strive to make it more so all the time.”