On Dec. 31 Chicago Botanic Garden reached a milestone for a single year’s attendance: one million visitors. The final tally for 2013 was 1,003,000. In 2012, the garden had about 954,000 visitors, officials said, but last summer’s warm, mild weather and some very warm days in December helped push attendance higher.
The 385-acre site features 26 display gardens. The 2013 budget was $28.8 million.
Sophia Siskel, president and CEO since 2006, said, “We’ve really seen a momentum building here the last five years. I didn’t anticipate that we’d reach a million people, but it was certainly something we aspired to.”
Siskel credits an initiative starting about 10 years earlier as “Barbara Carr, my predecessor, invested in a public relations and advertising campaign,from 2004 through 2006 with banners and placards on buses in Chicago and on billboards.
“That was the first step in building a region-wide and often national and international awareness,” said Siskel. “The second thing was the garden’s emphasis on the customer and providing an exceptional experience at a good value. You can come with as many people as you want in one car and pay ($25) for parking or come on foot or on bike and it’s free.”
In 2010 the garden’s board of directors unveiled a 10-year plan to expand their reach by adding events, including free and more frequent summer concerts, gardening classes and wellness programs like tai chi and yoga. The purpose was to spread events throughout the year instead of shooting for high attendance at a few large-scale events.
Garden public relations director Gloria Ciaccio said a volunteer corps of 1,325 remains the backbone of the garden’s sustained excellence. “We have volunteers who’ve been with us for 40, 37, 28 and 25 years,” she said. “We could not operate the garden without them.”
Betsy Sharp’s interest in planting prairie grasses led her to become a master gardener through the garden, a position she’s held for 30 years. Her work in the seed bank – cleaning, categorizing and storing plant seeds in deep freeze storage – is tedious but rewarding.
“We’re cleaning these seeds for storage against global warming and for the U.S. Department of Agriculture,” she said. “As a volunteer, working in the lab and the greenhouses, you learn a lot, sort of like learning about cooking by working in a restaurant kitchen.”
Bob Sharp, 91, is a greeter at the garden. “He’s out front, talking to people from all over the world and he invariably says how much it means to so many,” said Betsy Sharp.
On a recent snowy, frigid weekday, friends and garden members Kathleen Soriano of Park Ridge and Louisa Dianova of Skokie examined greenhouse plants at the RegensteinCenter.
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