Located in Omaha, Nebraska, Lauritzen Gardens is Omaha’s official arboretum and botanical garden center. As an arboretum and living museum, the botanical center features all-seasons plant displays and provides an urban garden oasis for the Omaha community.
History
The vision for Lauritzen Gardens dates back to 1980, an idea of former Omaha World-Herald Garden Parade columnist Helena Street. Official planning began two years later, with a committee selecting a site for the gardens on a bluff just west of the Missouri River. Construction on the facility’s first garden, the rose garden, began in 1995, with new garden areas added every subsequent year. Today, the site encompasses a 100-acre area near downtown Omaha, with many gardens visible from Interstate 80, and attracts more than 220,000 annual visitors. The gardens are privately funded and managed by a public-private partnership with the City of Omaha.
Gardens and Facilities
Dozens of gardens adorn the botanical center, with new gardens being added continuously.
Upon entrance, the Arrival and Parking Gardens feature colorful displays of annuals and perennials, along with the Tony and Mary Seina Family Gazebo, a fountain tribute to founder Helena Street, and several bronze statues. The gardens lead to the Visitor and Education Center, a 32,000-square-foot facility that is home to an educational center and the ConAgra Cafe, along with a horticultural library, gift shop, and floral display hall.
The Founder’s Garden was the first garden established at the center, constructed in 1993 as a collaboration with the Shady Choice Hosta Society. More than 50 varieties of hosta frame the gazebo and quiet reflection space, along with a vibrant spring garden and 150 other varieties of shade ferns and perennials. Other quiet reflection areas include the hillside Garden of Memories, featuring a 40-foot reflecting pool and several memorial tributes, and the Garden in the Glen, with a 300-foot stream winding through a shaded space filled with Japanese maple, astilbe, bleeding hearts, and a 30-year collection of locally-bred hostas.
The center’s four-acre Arboretum incorporates plants native to Nebraska’s oak hickory and maple linden forests, marsh and flood plain river margins, farmstead windbreak regions, prairies, and savannahs, and also serves as a natural sanctuary for the area’s migrating birds. Two sculptures, End of Day and Sunflowers, Snowbirds, and Lizards, decorate the arboretum’s planted grounds, which are still in the process of maturing.
Opened in 2014, the Marjorie K. Daugherty Conservatory is a 17,500-square-foot facility inspired by historical conservatory gardens. Situated at the entrance to a century-old bur oak forest, the conservatory features a 10-foot waterwall, a large Victoria water lily pond, and a gallery space for floral displays and special events. Outside the building, a ?-mile-long Woodland Trail takes visitors on a tour of the area’s natural flora.
Dedicated in 1997, the Robert H. Storz Family Rose Garden is a formally-designed garden featuring more than 2,000 plants. In addition to grandiflora, floribunda, hybrid tea, climbing, and shrub rose species, the garden also features an armillary sphere sundial centerpiece, designed by Nebraska artist Milt Heinrich. Just north of the rose garden, the hillside Model Railroad Garden uses structural elements such as leaves, twigs, bark, pinecones, and cinnamon sticks to create natural landscapes for an array of model train tracks. Created by Applied Imagination landscape designer Paul Busse, the garden’s seven model train lines wind past miniature replicas of Omaha landmarks, including St. Cecilia Cathedral and the old Union Station building.
The Victorian Garden blends English and Victorian techniques in a variety of formal and casual planting structures. Parts of the garden’s walls and structures are made from remnants salvaged from historic buildings in the city. Nearby, the English Perennial Border displays more than 300 colorful plant species and cultivars arranged in traditional English style, and a 3,000-square-foot Peony Garden is host to a variety of Chinese and Japanese peony trees.
The Song of the Lark Meadow, named after a short story by Nebraska author Willa Cather, is home to black-eyed Susans, dwarf red plains coreopsis, red corn poppy, yarrow, and blanket flowers. During the March to May blooming season, thousands of spring flowering bulbs and trees, including magnolias, dogwoods, crocuses, and grape hyacinth, line the nearby Spring Flowering Walk. A nine-bed Herb Garden is a collaboration with the Omaha Herb Society, home to an assortment of medicinal, culinary, and dyeing herbs, including more than a dozen variants of thyme. The Conservation Discovery Garden is committed to irrigation and conservation techniques that improve the health of the region’s streams, utilizing plants in its array that filter stormwater runoff.
The large lawn area of the Festival Garden is host to many of the botanical center’s annual garden festivals and outdoor events, featuring a small pond with geese fountains and displays of azaleas, mums, redbuds, poppy mallow, and Japanese anemone. Many educational opportunities throughout the year, including guided school tours and youth gardening classes, are hosted at the Children’s Garden.
100 Bancroft St, Omaha, NE 68108, Phone: 402-346-4002
