Lurie Garden - Culture

Culture

Art Institute of Chicago's Modern Wing from Lurie Garden

The world-class garden was an essential element of the park, as the motto of Chicago is Urbs in Horto, which is a Latin phrase meaning City in a Garden. The Garden also pays tribute to Carl Sandburg's moniker of Chicago as the "City of Big Shoulders" with a 15-foot (4.6 m) "shoulder" hedge that protects the perennial garden and encloses the park on two sides. It keeps the garden from being trampled by crowds exiting events at the neighboring Jay Pritzker Pavilion.

The "shoulder" hedge, which serves as the northern edge of the garden, also fills the space next to the void of the great lawn of the Jay Pritzker Pavilion. These hedges use a metal armature, to prefigure the mature hedge. The shoulder hedge is an evolving hedge screen of deciduous Fagus (beech) and Carpinus (hornbeam) and evergreen Thuja (arborvitae, also known as redcedars) that will eventually (over the course of approximately ten years) branch horizontally to fill the permanent armature frame and create a solid hedge.

The garden was one of the gardens depticted in the 2006 In Search of Paradise: Great Gardens of the World exhibition that was shown from May 12–October 22, 2006 in the Boeing Galleries and that was later shown in the Chicago Botanic Garden. The Chicago Botanic Garden developed the exhibition that included 65 photomurals of gardens from 21 countries using photographs that were less than five years old.