New Partnership to Revitalize Jens Jensen Formal Garden at Humboldt Park in Chicago

In a joint press release on October 5, 2016, the Garden Conservancy, Chicago Park District, and Chicago Parks Foundation formally announced a new partnership to revitalize the Jens Jensen Formal Garden at Humboldt Park.

The announcement follows an earlier agreement, signed in mid-July, for the Garden Conservancy to partner with the Chicago Parks Foundation to help the Chicago Park District in this project, starting by providing financial support and advice on a new planting plan and design for the site.

Revitalizing the formal garden at Humboldt Park is the Garden Conservancy’s first major preservation project in the upper Midwest, the first example of a historic Jen Jensen garden in our portfolio, and our first project in a dense urban neighborhood.

Historic photo of the garden hall and pergolas. All historic images are courtesy of the Chicago Park District, Special Collections.

About the Jens Jensen Formal Garden
The Jens Jensen Formal Garden, an iconic circular garden designed and built in 1908 by noted prairie-school landscape architect Jens Jensen, is situated near the center of Humboldt Park, a 219-acre parkland located in the ethnically diverse Humboldt Park neighborhood of Chicago.

Julia Bachrach of the Chicago Parks District explains that Jensen created a beautiful garden for the park—a formal rose garden, as the community wanted—one infused with “the grace of the prairie.” The garden at Humboldt Park is one of a very few formal Jens Jensen gardens still existing and is a rare example of an early stage of his design evolution.

For more than a century, the formal garden has played a significant role in its community. It provides an important green space in the middle of a densely populated urban area—a place for people to gather and to connect with nature as well as with each other. As Jens Jensen said, the garden offers beauty and respite “to those who have no other gardens except their window sills.”

Jensen’s design is typical of formal gardens of the period and features semi-circular beds filled with roses and perennials. Through the center line of the garden was a reflecting pool and a fountain. Encircling the garden, at a higher grade, is a terrace with wooden and concrete pergolas. Humboldt Park served as a living laboratory for Jensen’s designs including not only the formal garden, but also a lagoon that he expanded to emulate a “prairie river.”

In its current state, half of the semi-circular beds are covered with sod and the fountain and reflecting pool, are filled with concrete to reduce maintenance costs. The hardscape is in disrepair and the urn and benches were removed after being vandalized. Despite its current condition, visitors use the space both as a threshold to the park and a destination in itself for events, family occasions, and photographs.

The development of The 606—a new elevated multi-use trail and transportation alternative—also may greatly increase the number of visitors to the garden.

Below: historic photos and the same site today

To read more about this project, visit the Chicago Parks Foundation website and the Jensen Formal Garden website.