Denver Botanical Gardens Gift Shop
Denver Botanical Gardens Gift Shop - Founded in 1951, the Denver Botanic Gardens (DBG) has grown from a small group of horticulturally inclined citizens into a major civic organization. With an outstanding conservatory and major urban gardens complemented by a 750-acre suburban campus in Chatfield, DBG has become the nation's most visited botanical garden, according to CEO Brian Vogt, fulfilling its stated mission "to connect the
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Denver Botanical Gardens Gift Shop
man in plants, especially the plants of the Rocky Mountain Region and similar regions around the world." From an original collection of mostly native plants, it has expanded to include plant material from around the world in over forty different gardens. Behind the scenes, the DBG is also a research institution with scientists using collections and field studies to learn more about topics such as biodiversity, conservation and sustainability.
DBG's main York Street site occupies the former site of the Catholic section of the city's original cemetery. William H. Larimer, Jr., who founded Denver in 1858, established the cemetery a year later. The city acquired most of the cemetery in 1872 and operated it as the City Cemetery.
In the late nineteenth century, the City Cemetery increasingly lost customers to the newer Riverside (1876), Fairmount (1890), and Mount Olivet (1890) Cemeteries. In 1890, the city transformed much of the site into Congress Park, the larger western portion of which was rezoned in 1910 as Cheesman Park.
Built On A Boneyard
Mount Calvary Catholic Cemetery continued to operate until 1950, when the City of Denver purchased the 18-acre site and agreed to dispose of its approximately 6,000 bodies. It is estimated that several hundred bodies are still under the gardens and nearby Cheesman Park. During the recent construction in and around the gardens, about fifty bodies were exhumed and respectfully reburied.
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Incorporated on February 3, 1951, as the Botanical Gardens Foundation of Denver, DBG is an amalgamation of existing horticultural groups. Under the direction of leading nurseryman and naturalist George W. Kelly, DBG first planned its gardens on the southeast side of City Park. In 1952 Gladys and John Evans II paid local landscape architect Saco Rienk DeBoer $10,000 to plan 100 acres of gardens there.
In 1956, DeBoer laid out a stone canyon that mimics a high mountain canyon, which has been restored in recent times. A stream flowing through the canyon ends in a large lily pond. DeBoer donated forty-seven flowering apple trees, whose flowers his experiments showed were hardy enough for Denver's last freeze, while the Denver Rose Society donated 4,000 roses to the beds
which has been preserved to this day. In 1957 the DBG leased from the US Forest Service the 169-acre Mt. Goliath Alpine Study Area on the Mount Evans Highway about fifty miles from Denver. A two-mile nature trail winds through this rare forest of 1,500-year-old bristlecone pine, a major attraction in timberland to this day.
Built On A Boneyard
The trail is named for Michael Walter Pesman, a landscape architect, author, and teacher who helped found the DBG and promoted native plants. In 1958 Ruth and James Waring purchased the mansion at 909 York Street to give to DBG as its headquarters. Designed by Jules Jacques Benoit Benedict, the large two-story residence was originally built in 1926. The house has gray stucco walls decorated with stone and brick under a steep, green tile roof.
Next to the new headquarters, in 1958 the DBG began to turn the city-owned grounds of the old Catholic cemetery into gardens. Noted San Francisco landscape architect Garrett Eckbo planned gardens with water features and plantings that grew to include Colorado highlands, rose, and vegetable gardens as well as Saco DeBoer's Rocky Mountain Garden
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DBG also boasts North America's largest collection of plants from cold climates around the world. The Japanese Gardens, designed by Koichi Kawana, opened in 1979. The adjacent Bill Hosokawa Bonsai Pavilion, honoring a Denver Post editor and leader of the Colorado Japanese community, opened in 2012. A Home Demonstration Garden has
suggestions for home gardeners will be offered, while the world's first Xeriscape Demonstration Garden opened in 1987 to demonstrate low-water gardening. The Boettcher Foundation, whose money came in large part from the Ideal Cement Company, financed most of the DBG's construction and encouraged the use of concrete throughout.
Birth Of The Gardens
Even the ground lamps are concrete "trees" with globe lights pretending to be fruits. Concrete is used especially in the gardens' signature building, the Edna C. and Claude K. Boettcher Memorial Conservatory. Opened in 1966, the conservatory was designed by Denver architects Victor Hornbein and Edward D. White, Jr.
Their highly original design uses faceted Plexiglas panels between interlocking, cast-in-place concrete arches that rise fifty feet above tropical trees. The panels are sloped to prevent condensation from raining on guests. Inside, in a humid, warm climate, some 600 species are cultivated amid waterfalls and pools built into a sloping, naturalistic environment.
The raw concrete building has finely detailed paving and stone trim, oak doors in steel frames, and geometric colored and leaded glass in the doors and windows. The conservatory complex includes greenhouses, storage, and laboratories. Hornbein also designed the Bromeliad House, which was added to the west end of the conservatory in 1981 for its namesake tropical flowering plant.
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An expansive new building, the Boettcher Memorial Center, opened on the northeast side of the conservatory in 1971. Designed to blend architecturally with the conservatory, the newer building (also planned by Hornbein and White) opens onto a wide stone-plan lobby with vestibule . waterfalls, pools, and lots of plants.
Birth Of The Gardens
The building originally housed a 400-seat Horticulture Hall, three classrooms, meeting rooms, a plant preparation room, the Kathryn Kalmbach Herbarium, and the Helen Fowler Library. (The library and Herbarium moved to DBG's Freyer-Newman Center.) In 1973, DBG leased a 750-acre preserve southwest of Denver from the US Army Corps of Engineers.
The Corps acquired the site along Deer Creek as part of its floodplain for the Chatfield Dam, Reservoir, and State Park built after the disastrous Denver flood of 1965. The corps leased the land to DBG on the condition that it remain a natural area, with wetlands along Deer Creek accessible by hiking trails.
DBG opened the Chatfield site to the public in 1988. Now known as the Denver Botanic Gardens at Chatfield, the complex includes the 1886 Deer Creek School House as well as two working historic farms. The Hildebrand Ranch complex built in 1866 is a National Register site consisting of a farmhouse, dairy barn, barn, ice house, working blacksmith shop, and other outbuildings.
It and the nearby Green Farm have been restored as a working farm and interpretive centre. A nearby one-room schoolhouse has been restored for educational purposes. Chatfield hosts a popular fall corn maze and pumpkin festival as well as holiday lights. The grounds are decorated with rotating sculpture exhibits, a lavender test garden, a large historic iris garden, and other gardens.
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