Wilder Park Conservatory

The story begins in 1868, when Seth and Elizabeth Wadhams settled on a largely treeless farm in Elmhurst. They built a house known as White Birch, planted trees of many different species and put up a greenhouse, which Seth Wadhams built for his wife.

In 1921 the Elmhurst Park District acquired the property, which became the town's first public park: an undeveloped cow pasture to the north, and the family home, gardens and clay tennis courts to the south. In 1923 the district decided to add a larger conservatory to the old greenhouse, its very first capital project, although its own history page places the addition and public opening in 1924. A north greenhouse was added in 1926, a few years after the conservatory.

Over the decades both growing houses were altered so often that they kept few original components, which ruled out listing on the National Register of Historic Places. In autumn 2013 a restoration began, funded by a $1.84 million Illinois PARC grant: the 1923 conservatory was kept, the two deteriorating greenhouses were replaced by a single aluminium structure, and a new propagating house was built to the east. The neighbouring house, remodelled by the district and reopened in 2008 as Wilder Mansion, is now used for events.

The conservatory is a modest display pavilion: the restoration kept it on its original footprint of about 1,500 square feet, roughly 140 m². The district describes it as a glass house with arched windows, and the 2013 project set out to preserve both the existing structure and its outward appearance. The work brought new heating, ventilation and air-conditioning equipment, a new glazing system and a better distributed electrical supply, and a row of arborvitae on the south side was removed to let more light reach the plants.

The floor received particular care. Instead of stamping a pattern into the concrete, the contractors tooled it by hand to recreate the design of the 1923 floor. Behind the pavilion, an aluminium production greenhouse of about 3,000 square feet (some 280 m²), larger than the conservatory itself, replaces the former south and north houses. A wheelchair-accessible vestibule separates old from new and opens onto the park's formal gardens, and a free-standing propagating house has replaced the temporary hoop house used until then.

The pavilion holds tropical and flowering plants arranged around a small pond stocked with koi and other fish. Specimens noted there include a large Pachypodium with a swollen, bottle-shaped trunk and a tree-like Opuntia. Before the 2013 works the district identified five plants that predated 1998 and kept cuttings or divisions of each: a night-blooming cereus, a thirty-year-old Opuntia, a date palm, a bird of paradise and a Ming asparagus fern.

The production greenhouses, which are not open to visitors, also serve local ecology: since 1993 they have raised native prairie grasses, forbs and woodland flowers for planting in natural areas, and output has grown from 500 to nearly 12,000 plants a year. Three flower shows mark the calendar, in autumn, over the winter holidays and in spring.

The conservatory stands at the corner of Prospect Avenue and Church Street in Wilder Park, next to Wilder Mansion and the formal gardens that extend it, with the Elmhurst University campus just across the avenue. Half an hour is enough for the main room, which pairs well with a walk through the gardens and the rest of the park. The best times to come are the autumn, holiday and spring flower shows. Residents often use the conservatory as a backdrop for prom, wedding and graduation photographs, and the district counted about 13,000 visits a year in the early 2010s.