Oak Park Conservatory

The conservatory began as an initiative of Oak Park residents to house exotic plants they had collected on their travels. Wikipedia dates that foundation to 1914, while the official site, which speaks of plants dating from the founding, dates the institution to 1929, the year the present glasshouse was built. It is the work of the Foley Greenhouse Manufacturing Company.

The building decayed over the decades. In 1970 a Citizens Committee for the Conservatory prevented its loss; some had proposed replacing it with a parking lot. The Friends of the Oak Park Conservatory, created in 1986, have since raised more than $840,000 for improvements.

Later milestones include the opening of the Conservatory Center in 2000, listing on the National Register of Historic Places on 8 March 2005, the Rubinstein Memorial Garden in 2011 and, in 2015, the Elsie Jacobsen Discovery Garden and a stormwater bioswale on East Avenue. For the 90th anniversary in 2019, solar panels, beehives and rainwater cisterns were installed.

The sources describe an Edwardian-style glass building, erected in 1929 by a specialist manufacturer, Foley Greenhouse Manufacturing Co. The conservatory stands on a two-acre site on Garfield Street and offers about 8,000 square feet (700 m²) of growing space. According to Wikipedia it is the third-largest conservatory in the Chicago area.

The site is organised around three large display rooms, devoted to Mediterranean, tropical and desert plants. The Conservatory Center, opened in 2000, gave the site educational and operational facilities. The 2019 installations, namely solar panels, five rainwater cisterns, three beehives and a compost-tea system, reflect an ecological approach to running the place, as does the 2015 bioswale on East Avenue. The sources consulted give neither the structure's dimensions nor its architect.

More than 3,000 plants are grown, some of them dating back to the conservatory's early years. According to Wikipedia the desert room holds cacti (Cereus, Opuntia, Pereskia), succulents and woody plants such as olive and fig. Orchids, ferns, begonias and tree ferns occupy a tropical space, and a rainforest room gathers monstera, palms, cycads and bananas, with koi and turtles. The official site instead presents three rooms, Mediterranean, tropical and desert; the exact layout may have changed.

Three resident parrots live in the tropical room. The conservatory also produces some 20,000 bedding plants a year for the village's parks and holds seasonal sales: spring plants, autumn chrysanthemums, poinsettias and succulents.

The conservatory stands at 615 Garfield Street in Oak Park, west of Chicago. An hour is enough to walk through the rooms, longer if the recent outdoor gardens are added: the Rubinstein garden and the Elsie Jacobsen Discovery Garden, devoted to native Illinois ecosystems.

Visitors value it as a refuge in winter as well as in intense heat. The calendar includes a plant sale and garden walk in spring, guided tours, gardening lectures and the "Uncorked" evening series.