GREEN BAY - A photo of the 1994 groundbreaking of Green Bay Botanical Garden shows a group of six, but the number of people who dug in, both with shovels and without, to create one of the city’s most beautiful destinations is much greater.
It was visionaries with grand ideas, regular folks with a simple interest, donors of dollar amounts big and small, volunteers with dirt under their nails, leaders in the community, passionate home gardeners, professional horticulture types, local companies with heavy equipment and extension cords to spare, members who bought in before the first plants that ever went in the ground, and on and on, all working together to open a public garden that welcomed its first visitors in 1996.
Twenty-five years later, Green Bay Botanical Garden will celebrate its silver anniversary Saturday with a party on a 47-acre site that nobody back then could have imagined would become what it is now.
“The garden is not like anything we visualized. It’s better. It’s much, much better,” said Jerry Landwehr, who was the garden’s first horticulture director for six years and one of the people in the groundbreaking ceremony photo.
“Everybody in that garden’s history had a part that was very important. Everybody can take ownership, but who’s the big driver of it? The whole community. There's a whole community behind this garden.”
It's stillthat way.
The seeds of that original idea — a place to enrich the lives of people through plants — sown long before the garden was ever born, are still being nurtured by a community that visits GBBG, not just for its more than 62,000 permanent plants in 33 display gardens, but for weddings, concerts, summer camps, touring exhibits, classes, school field trips and the holiday tradition of Garden of Lights.
“You bring people out for an event and then they fall in love with the plants,” said Susan Garot, who has been the garden’s executive director since 2008 and just the fourth person in that position.
During itsmilestone year, Garot has been hearing a familiar refrain from the crowds during this summer’s 16 amphitheater concerts in the Schneider Family Grand Garden.
“I can’t tell you how many people come up to me every single time they see me and just marvel at what this garden has become,” she said. “People who have been with us for 30 years or more as members, they had no concept that it would ever grow like it has grown. It really comes down to we have an amazing community that is very, very supportive of this treasure we have.”
Green Bay Botanical Garden now stands alongside Bay Beach Amusement Park, NEW Zoo & Reforestation Camp, Bay Beach Wildlife Sanctuary and the National Railroad Museum as a top attraction for visitors who cometo a Green Bay Packers gameor training camp and want to see what else the area has to offer beyond Lambeau Field.
“In the early days, one of our mantras was we want to build a world-class organization. I think we did it,” said Glenn Spevacek, who has been involved with the garden's planning since the 1980s and was its first director from 1993 to 1999.
“I’ve traveled to over 60 public gardens in my lifetime and Green Bay Botanical Garden is better than most of them. There are some really great ones, but I think we can hold our heads high and say that here in Green Bay we have a world-class public garden.”
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There were ups and downs in early years, but 'none of us ever wavered'
To get to the rootof GBBG’s beginnings you have to go back to 1978 when Brown County Extension agent Paul Hartman formed a group called Plants in the Urban Environment.
Along with Bob Mongin, the city'slandscape architect; Ray Pagel, a longtime Green Bay Press-Gazette writer and editor and a founding member of The Gardeners Club of Green Bay; Lee Hansen of Schroeder’s Flowers; Gail Fischer; Roger Murphy, Dave Parsons, Landwehr; and others, the group looked at everything from city trees to park plantings as a way to make Brown County a nicer place to live through horticulture. A public garden was always on the list, originally the suggestion of Pagel, who frequently wrote about agriculture for the newspaper.
“At the time, the Packers, they stunk. I can remember every meeting practically, ‘We’ve got to have something else to do in this town besides the Packers,’” saidSpevacek, who went to his first meeting in 1980.
“A public garden was not exactly on everybody’s to-do list here in Green Bay. It was kind of a new concept,” he said. “We always said in the early stages we were the last link in the cultural chain in Green Bay. We had a symphony, we had a museum, we had a zoo, all these pieces, but we were missing a public garden. We were the last piece, hoping people would come eventually.”
Hartman was well-known and well-respected in the community, and his involvement helped give the idea of a public garden credibility and also brought more people into the fold.
Progress in the 1980s was slow but steady. At times, Landwehr said it felt like an "emotional roller coaster." He remembers getting back an early feasibility study that showed Green Bay wouldn't support a botanic garden.
"You talk about letting the wind out of everybody’s sails. There were a lot of those down moments. Lots of them," he said. "But everybody just kept going, a little bit at a time, a little bit at a time. The right people were in the right positions to make it happen.”
By 1986, GBBG incorporated, appointed its first board of directors and hosted its inaugural garden fair fundraiser.
More than 30 sites had been considered for the garden, including propertysouth of De Pere and near Gillett, before deciding on land owned by Northeast Wisconsin Technical College on Green Bay's west side. It had the perfect terrain with rolling hills and the old Larsen Canning Company Apple Orchard, and itoffered easy highway access from State 29 and U.S. 41, Landwehr said.
Acquiring the land in 1992 through a lease agreement with NWTC was contingent on the garden raising $1.2 million through a capital campaign — no small amount then or today. Gail Fischer was heavily involved in raising the money, and while there was ample support in the community, it wasn’t always an easy sell. More than once she heard, “What on earth is a botanical garden and why do we need that?”
The campaign marched on.
“You didn’t take no for an answer. I used to tell people, ‘I’ll forgive you for not giving as long as you forgive me for asking,’” Fischer said. “We always had this belief that this was going to happen. None of us ever wavered in our desire, and I think because of that attitude it gave credibility to the whole project to the community and to people that were donating money.”
The fund drive got a major boost when Gertrude B. Nielsen, wife of Arthur Nielsen, the founder of A.C. Nielsen Co., donated $200,000. She lived in Chicago, but the company had a marketing office in downtown Green Bay in the '50s and '60s. Garden board member Jerry Krueger had the idea to write her a letter. That sizable donation out of Chicago became a big selling point for generating donations closer to home, Fischer said.
The campaign ended up exceeding its goal and raised $1.4 million. The garden opened four years later, and the Gertrude B. Nielsen Children’s Garden a year after that. Nielsen was 100 when she attended its grand opening in 1997.
Membership reaches all-time high during the pandemic
That first capital campaign has been followed by four others in the last 25 years. On Wednesday, GBBG publicly announced an $11.5 million campaign to expand the half-acre children’s garden by 2 acres. More than $9.5 million has already been raised, with plans for construction to begin early next year.
“It’s just going to be unlike anything in the Midwest for sure, if not the country,” Garot said. “It really will transform environmental education for children.”
It’s expected to draw from across Wisconsin and beyond, increase membership and push GBBG’s annual estimated economic impact in the community to $12 million, up from nearly $9 million in 2019, Garot said.
The number of garden members peaked at 3,900 two years ago, but the pandemic has turned out to be something of a boon for membership. As people seek out places to enjoy nature and look for more outdoor options, the garden has seen its membership climb to a record high 4,700, Garot said.
The garden typically sees 150,000 to 180,000 visitors annually. Even with the COVID-19 shutdown during key spring months in 2020, attendance was at 97,000. Garot expects it will be back near 150,000 this year, with a noticeable jump in visitors coming from the Fox Valley and farther away since the start of the pandemic.
“In a world of clutter, descent, discourse, fighting and disagreement, everybody needs to have a place that they can come to and forget about all the troubles and just tune out the world and tune into nature,” Garot said. “There’s nothing more healing than just being in nature."
The gardens themselves continue to grow from a modest handful when it opened to sprawling displays of perennials, annuals and bulbs as well as shade, woodland, rose and conifer gardens. There’s still a heavy emphasis on ornamental and unique plants, but newer gardens, like the Grand Garden that opened in 2017,reflect the growing interest in wildlife- and pollinator-friendly, lower-maintenance native plants.
About halfthe site’s 47 acres are formally developed with gardens, structures, buildings and parking lots. Another 10 to 12 acres are wetlands that will never be developed, Garot said. The garden’s master plan calls for eventually making those areas more accessible with boardwalks.
With roughly 10 acres of land still to develop, GBBG has plenty of room to grow in its next 25 years.
“In terms of a gardens, this thing is just a baby,” said Landwehr, who considers it among the 10 best botanical gardens in the country. “This garden will continually change. The bones of it will probably stay the same but the themes of it, that’s how a garden grows.
"I would love to be able to look 25 years down the line and see what it looks like. If it got this good in 25 years, it could get much, much better.”
It's a 25th birthday party
What: Outdoor family-friendly activities, including crafts, games, scavenger hunts and garden tours; local garden groups and gardening expert Melinda Myers; last chance to see"Washed Ashore: Art to Save the Sea" traveling exhibit; concessions
When: 9 a.m.-4 pm. Saturday
Where: Green Bay Botanical Garden, 2600 Larsen Road
Cost: Free. All attendees must register in advance at gbbg.orgfor a selected entry time.
What else: After-hours '90s-themedparty 6-9 p.m. Saturday with Dave Matthews tribute band Ants Marching. Tickets are $20 in advance at gbbg.org; timed entry required; no tickets sold at the door. Must be 21 and older.
ContactKendra Meinertat 920-431-8347 or kmeinert@greenbay.gannett.com. Follow her on Twitter @KendraMeinert.