Home Things to Do Gardens About the Gardens

Things to Do

From guided events to custom adventures, there is a lot to do at Cantigny!

Gardens

About the Gardens

The gardens of Cantigny Park offer beauty and tranquility for all to enjoy. Experience them at your own pace, and be sure to return throughout the seasons – our display gardens receive new plant material every spring, summer and fall. Cantigny’s horticulture team is known for creativity, so expect a few surprises, too!

Accessibility

ADA-compliant pathways are wheelchair and stroller friendly, and ramps facilitate movement between upper and lower levels. Pathways have been further enhanced by a new drainage system, brick edging (replacing metal edging), and stone dust pavement (replacing pebble pavement).

The gardens also feature more seating options, including a circular bench around a large and centrally located Bur Oak. Additional shade will develop when climbers such as nonfruiting grapevines, Clematis and Rose engulf the series of arching steel trellises.

Explore Cantigny's Gardens

Display Gardens

Rose Garden

Rock & Gravel Gardens

Logarium

Hosta Garden

Idea Garden

Rose Garden

Rose Garden
Fifty rose varieties/cultivars and a 250-year-old bur oak highlight this popular venue for wedding ceremonies. The collection includes the Chicago Peace Rose, a glowing pink flower with a butter-yellow heart that was discovered on the estate. Mosaic walkways recall the original designs of famed landscape architect Franz Lipp. Bordering Japanese yews add privacy, establishing this garden as a distinct “room” within the upper display gardens.

Rock & Gravel Gardens

Rock Garden/Gravel Garden
Cantigny’s horticultural diversity spiked upon completion of this all-new garden in 2019. Plant material within crevices, ledges, and gravel present a botanical showplace truly unique to the Midwest. Massive limestone blocks and slabs—hand-selected from a Wisconsin quarry—form raised beds and steps that invite close views of unusual plantings. About 250 plant varieties are represented, from sun-soaking cacti such as Eastern Prickly Pear and hot-pink Dianthus to shade-loving ferns and dwarf hostas.

Cantigny’s horticulture team gathered ideas and inspiration from visits to the rock gardens of Allen Centennial Garden and Olbrich Botanical Gardens, both in Madison, Wis. Pathways lead visitors through the space instead of around the edges, making the Rock Garden an immersive experience.

Logarium

Logarium
Old tree stumps and large branches form the nucleus of this unique attraction near the Rock Garden. It was inspired by a type of garden born in Victorian England known as a “stumpery”—a display featuring stumps and architectural pieces of wood with complementing shade-loving plants. Dubbed the Logarium by Cantigny Horticulture, the garden highlights rare and native species of perennials while relying heavily on the texture and color from hundreds of ferns and mosses. Watch for colorful orchids here in the summer.

Hosta Garden

Hosta Garden
Located on the south side of the Visitors Center and newly designed and expanded, this serene space with 300 hostas and 100 companion plants is a collaboration with the Northern Illinois Hosta Society. It’s also one of just 25 gardens to be designated a National Display Garden by the American Hosta Society.

Idea Garden

Idea Garden
A fan favorite since 1990, this one-acre space aims to inspire home gardeners, offering them ideas for their own landscapes. The garden is fun, quirky, and always interesting. A “native riverscape” was added in 2020, complete with waterfall, running stream, boulders, and footbridge. While not intended as a “children’s garden,” the step stones and bridge are natural attractions, along with goldfish, frogs, and possibly other creatures below.

The rest of the Idea Garden typically features themed beds bursting with colorful annuals and assorted vegetable and herb plantings. The garden’s west entrance is distinguished by “moon gate”—a circular, steel-tube structure that captures the attention of new and returning guests, inviting them into the ever-changing garden that lives up to its name.

History

During the early 1930s, Colonel Robert R. McCormick’s estate held an experimental farm on site, which served as a working “laboratory” with the goal of serving the family farms that blanketed the countryside. The experimental farm tried new species of crop plants, tested theories of planting and harvesting, and investigated new practices in raising productive farm animals.  Other experimental farms existed across the nation and one of the most successful was Colonel McCormick’s at Cantigny.

To educate and share the accomplishments of experimental farms, McCormick’s Chicago Tribune ran a weekly column entitled “Day by Day Stories of the Experimental Farms.” These trusted reports helped shape the future of the Midwest as a leader in agriculture.

After McCormick’s death in 1955, the Board of Directors decided to change Cantigny’s focus from agriculture to horticulture by hiring famed landscape architect Franz Lipp to design and build a world-class garden. In 1967, Lipp began construction of this lush, horticultural masterpiece, which is one of the largest display gardens in the Midwest with more than 160,000 annuals, perennials, ground covers and flowering shrubs and trees. Guests are encouraged to visit the gardens throughout the year to witness the ever-changing beauty of its seasonal glory.

Greenhouse

Nearly all of the annual plants in the Cantigny gardens originate on site. In fact, close to a quarter-million plants are produced in the Cantigny greenhouse each year — up to 1,000 botanical varieties! These herbaceous plants add color and diversity throughout the park, golf course, and building interiors.

The main 18,500-square-foot main greenhouse, opened in 1987, allows year-round plant production. Cantigny garden spaces are replanted every spring, summer and fall with home-grown annuals, providing fresh visual experiences for visitors. The greenhouse also accommodates Cantigny’s holiday poinsettia crop, transforming the space to a sea of red, pink, and white in late fall.

Because it is a functional workplace production area, and for safety, the greenhouse is not open to the public.