Once there was a boy who loved model trains. When the boy grew up, he became the chief engineer of train exhibitions at the Chicago Botanic Garden—and he still plays with trains. “I hardly get to play with my railroad at home because I get to play with this one,” said Dave Rodelius, in the tone of a man who can’t believe his good fortune.
Dave Rodelius shows off one of the stars of the Model Railroad Garden this spring: a steam engine!
This year marks Rodelius’s 15th season at the Model Railroad Garden: Landmarks of America, which opens Saturday, May 9, with a special treat. This season, the Model Railroad Garden will pay tribute to steam engines, in honor of the 125th anniversary of the Chicago Horticultural Society (the Society founded and manages the Chicago Botanic Garden). Models of historic steam engines will chug along 1,600 feet of track, representing the early days of the Society, when steam engines ran commuter coaches along Chicago’s elevated tracks and hauled freight over long distances.
Q. Dave, you have the greatest job title ever! How did you get this job?
A. I was retired, and my wife saw a little blurb in the newspaper that the Chicago Botanic Garden needed tram drivers. So I became a tram driver. One day, I saw that they had torn things up right in the middle of the Garden. I said, “What the Sam Hill are they doing here?” That’s how I found out there was going to be a model railroad out there. Then one of the secretaries, who worked for a vice president, found out that I had been into model railroads all my life. So one day, the vice president of visitor operations at the time called me into her office and asked if I would be interested in managing the railroad. I didn’t get a chance to ask her how much I’d have to pay.
Visitors of all ages enjoy the Model Railroad Garden.
Q. But that was back in 2000—and the railroad exhibition was going to be a five-month exhibition.
A. We had more than 100,000 people come through in five months. The little path out there was constantly packed with people. One thing led to another. In our first year, the trains didn’t make any sounds—no choo-choos or whistles or anything, so we added sound cars. Gradually, the railroad became so darn popular that it became a permanent exhibition.
Q. So you became interested in trains as a kid?
A. When I was 6 or 7, my dad bought me a Lionel train. That train would go around the Christmas tree and in the bedroom. Now I have a model railroad layout of Solothurn, Switzerland, where my daughter got married; it’s in my basement. It has Swiss trains and a ski lift.
Q. It sounds like you were a busy kid.
A. My family had 2.5 acres that we farmed in World War II for vegetables. I sold vegetables in the neighborhood in my little wagon. Then I was in the Boy Scouts and became an Eagle Scout in 1948….I grew up in Evanston and still live in Evanston, and I have lunch with some sixth-grade classmates once a month.
Q. And you’ve had some other interesting jobs before you started running the railroad.
A. I received a bachelor’s degree in animal science at the University of Illinois. I wanted to raise cattle. In college, I was an intern at a purebred cattle farm. The most fascinating thing I did was to help birth calves. You get to see the little rascals trying to get up and stumble around….Eventually, I was drafted into the U.S. Army engineer corps. Two years later, I was discharged and became a manager at a livestock feed manufacturing company. Then my dad bought a photography studio in 1961, and I became a photographer.
Q. What keeps you motivated after all these years?
A. My passion for the railroad is what drives me—I absolutely love this railroad. The same passion goes for everyone. We have 18 engineers and 75 to 80 volunteers. They get along so darn well that I can’t believe it. You cannot keep these people away; they are just so dedicated. They whole thing has kept me young. I get up and down on my hands and knees all the time. I should write to the AARP—if you want to hear about a good job to have, we at the Garden have it.
Left to right: Model Railroad Garden volunteer engineers Ken Press and Mark Rosenblum with George Knuth, staff engineer
Q. What do you do in your spare time?
A. I do some gardening, and some fishing and boating. My wife and I have three daughters and three grandkids. My wife is spectacular, one of the greatest people I’ve ever met.
When you dream of saving plants for a living, you don’t expect to wait for tribal elders to rule on whether you can get started…or to sleep in the sage-scented high desert on your first camping trip ever…or to walk through the woods to spray your hand-raised seedlings with a deer repellent that smells likes rotten eggs and garlic.
But when you are driven by a passion for plants, you do whatever it takes to move forward, said three alumni of a graduate program offered by the Chicago Botanic Garden and Northwestern University. The two institutions combined their resources in 2005 to offer a unique program in plant biology and conservation; the program marks its tenth anniversary this year.
Tracy Misiewicz climbs into the canopy of a tropical rainforest to collect data on pollination.
Students take courses at both the Chicago Botanic Garden and Northwestern University and work with researchers and faculty from both institutions. Alumni of the graduate program—which includes a doctoral track—are working for nonprofits and agencies including the Field Museum, the Morton Arboretum, and the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency, and participating in research projects in places including India, China, and Malaysia.
Here are the stories of these three graduates from the master’s program:
Tracy Misiewicz
Program graduate Tracy Misiewicz in the field.
Tracy Misiewicz’s research project was on hold, while the village elders poured fermented rice wine into the ground. During the ceremony, in the western mountains of Cameroon, the elders chanted in Bakossi, a Bantu language, asking their ancestors if Misiewicz—a native of Maryland who decided to become a scientist in the seventh grade—could enter the rainforest. Then the elders threw down a handful of cacao nuts to see if they would land in a certain order. They did; the ancestor had granted permission.
And that, recalled Misiewicz with a delighted laugh, is how she began her fieldwork in Cameroon. With her sister as a research assistant and their Ngomboku neighbor—a basket weaver—as a guide, Misiewicz trudged through the forest to look for Dorstenia, the second largest genus in the moraceae (mulberry) family. Dorstenia species—some of which are considered threatened or are already extinct—are used by indigenous people for medicinal purposes and show promise in their use in modern medicine. As part of her master’s thesis, Misiewicz looked at the family tree and evolutionary history of some species within the genus.
In Cameroon, Misiewicz and her sister learned how to cook local dishes and dance to local music. “You really get to know the people and the culture,” said Misiewicz. “When we left, we were crying, and the ladies in the village were crying.”
For her master’s research at the Garden, Misiewicz worked with adviser and Garden scientist Nyree Zerega, Ph.D., and Garden conservation scientist Jeremie Fant, Ph.D. “They are two of the smartest and nicest and most supportive mentors I could have had,” said Misiewicz, who went on to get her Ph.D. at the University of California, Berkeley. “They made science fun. They made me understand that when your experiment didn’t work out or things are going wrong, it’s OK. I learned to overcome and move forward and still love science…at Berkeley, my experience was wonderful, but there were times where I was like, ‘What am I doing? I’m not having fun. Nothing is working.’ Always, I would think back to my experience at the Chicago Botanic Garden, and think, ‘I love science.’”
Misiewicz now works as a science project specialist for the Organic Center, a nonprofit organization in Washington, D.C., that focuses on research and education projects related to organic food and farming. The job is a good fit—she loves policy, science, and thinking through problems. “I think science is sort of like cooking in that you can follow a ‘recipe’ and learn to extract DNA,” Misiewicz said. “That’s not the hard part. It’s the thinking critically and creatively and problem solving, and understanding what’s going on. That’s what I really took away from the Garden…I learned how to think.”
Alicia Foxx
Program graduate Alicia Foxx with Northwestern University Provost Daniel Linzer, and Chicago Botanic Garden President and CEO Sophia Shaw.
Alicia Foxx hit the ground running when she started her master’s degree program, under the supervision of Andrea Kramer, Ph.D., a conservation scientist at the Garden. “The second time I met her,” recalled Foxx, “we were getting on a plane” to work on a research project in the Southwest.
The two of them drove and camped in the high desert of the Colorado Plateau, which covers parts of Utah, Colorado, New Mexico, and Arizona, including the Grand Canyon. Foxx, a native of Chicago, had never slept outside or seen mountains before. And she had never seen the way that invasive species could choke out native plants, including bunch grasses and wildflowers.
“On paper, it was a very interesting subject,” Foxx said. “You’ve got invasive plants that are taking over the West. But I think seeing how there were pretty much one or two [native plants left] in a very large landscape and how we’re losing the plant diversity that we really need to gain back was very different than just learning about it. It made me think, ‘This work is really important.’”
Originally, as an undergraduate at Elmhurst College, Foxx had planned to become a veterinarian—until she worked with her advisor, a botanist, on an invasive species project. “I just loved it,” she said. “I thought, ‘This is really interesting, and plants are really cool.’” One day, while looking up a list of invasive plants on the Garden’s website, something else caught her eye. “I thought, ‘Oh, there’s a graduate program there?’ So I clicked on the link.”
Foxx was accepted into the Garden’s master’s program and, in June 2012, made the weeklong trip with Dr. Kramer to the Colorado Plateau. With a team of researchers, they gathered the seeds of promising native plants—those tough enough to thrive in harsh conditions—as part of the national Seeds of Success collection program.
For her master’s thesis, Foxx studied native species that may be able to compete with cheatgrass (Bromus tectorum), an invasive species in the Plateau. Now, she is a doctoral candidate in the plant biology and conservation program. “I am so excited about working at the Garden for another five or six years,” she said. On some days, especially in the summer, she gets to the Garden an hour early to visit favorite spots, including the English Walled Garden.
Someday, Foxx hopes to have a role similar to Kramer’s, as both a researcher and an advisor. “Andrea is a very intelligent researcher who thinks of rather elegant research questions,” Foxx said. “On the advising side, she is very kind, understanding, and patient, and this has helped me to grow as a scientist.”
Byron Tsang
Program graduate Byron Tsang working in the field.
As an undergraduate at Northwestern University, Byron Tsang—now a project manager and ecologist with the Chicago Park District—was a chemistry and biology major. Tsang, who grew up in Atlanta, thought he might go into some sort of disease research, specializing in immunology and diagnostics. But something else tugged at him.
With a passing interest in ecology, Tsang took some field ecology classes and volunteered to work on the North Branch Restoration Project. (The organization helps protect and restore native Illinois ecosystems along the North Branch of the Chicago River.) And on vacation in New Zealand, he happened to learn about a challenging ecological problem—a common weed was taking over pastureland needed for sheep. When he finished his undergraduate studies and decided to pursue a master’s degree, Tsang had settled on a new field: plant biology. “I thought, ‘Hey, I could actually do this for a living,’” Tsang recalled.
Tsang wasn’t sure what his master’s thesis would be about, but he knew that he wanted to focus on a local problem. “I ended up falling in love with midwestern ecology,” he said. His adviser, associate conservation scientist Daniel Larkin, Ph.D., steered him to the Garden’s Jim Steffen, a senior ecologist. Steffen, who is leading restoration efforts in the Garden’s McDonald Woods, mentioned an intriguing question: why had two native wildflowers—pointed-leaf tick trefoil and violet lespedeza—failed to take off in the Woods? (The two legume species had been able to grow in other area oak woodlands; both are indicator species that appear in healthy woodlands.) Tsang took on the question as his master’s thesis; as part of his research, he sprayed young seedlings in the woods with a smelly deer repellent.
“My experience studying at the Garden really set the stage for my career as an ecologist,” Tsang said. “I learned a great deal about the intricate and often delicate ecological relationships that tie Chicago’s natural areas together, but equally important, I built invaluable personal relationships with academics, scientists, and restoration specialists in the Chicago area, all of whom I consider my colleagues and co-conspirators in my ongoing work at the Park District.”
As the first day of summer approaches, the Krasberg Rose Garden begins a show of flowers like none other.
More than 5,000 roses begin to unfurl countless buds in myriad colors that gradually fill the air with delicate, sweet scents. Dedicated in 1985, the Rose Garden is home to 200 varieties of roses that include old garden roses (also called antique or heirloom roses), hybrid tea roses, floribundas, miniatures, grandifloras, climbers, shrubs, and several other types.
Singin’ in the Rain™ floribunda rose (Rosa ‘MACivy’)
A focal point among the roses is an impressive fountain designed in the shape of a Tudor rose (see lore, below). Amble along the curving path through the three-acre garden and you’ll discover some of the more than 34,000 other plants—trees, shrubs, and perennials—that enhance the Rose Garden’s overall design. Nearby (technically outside the parameters of the Rose Garden) is the History of Roses Bed, boasting a rose collection that spans antique varieties, from the earliest wild rose to modern hybrids. Newer All-America Rose Selections winners are also on display.
“I hope visitors view the garden for the aesthetic experience it is—the way it looks and smells,” said Tom Soulsby, the senior horticulturist who oversees the Rose Garden. “There’s probably a rose for everybody and every place.”
Walking on Sunshine™ floribunda rose (Rosa ‘JACmcady’)
Besides their incredible beauty and an abundance of blossoms, many of the roses on display were chosen for their hardiness, disease and insect resistance, long period of bloom, and low maintenance requirements. “There’s not a lot to fear when it comes to growing roses,” said Soulsby. He aims to educate gardeners and demystify rose care.
Rose maintenance—pruning, removing spent blooms, mulching, and monitoring for disease and insects—is a collaboration among Soulsby, other garden staff, and volunteers. “We take the most environmentally friendly means of dealing with insects and disease, and sometimes that means doing nothing,” Soulsby said. “One of our objectives is to minimize the use of chemicals. The volunteers are trained to look for things that might need to be addressed. Sometimes it involves handpicking Japanese beetles to get rid of them or handpicking leaves with black spot if the problem is small. If fungus is prevalent, we’re careful about sanitizing our tools with disinfectants so it doesn’t spread from one plant to another.”
The roses receive a water-soluble fertilizer in summer, which is important because each plant spends a lot of energy creating blooms. Deadheading—removing the spent flowers—is also done during summer. “That encourages roses to repeat bloom. If you don’t deadhead them, they form hips,” Soulsby said. Hips are the rose fruits that contain seeds and they may be shades of red, orange, purple, or black. The colorful hips provide winter interest and are often enjoyed by wildlife.
Most of the roses are pruned after Thanksgiving, and the crowns of the plants are covered with 2 to 3 feet of composted horse manure (preferred over Styrofoam rose cones) for winter protection. The compost is removed in spring and used as mulch. “It’s a great soil amendment and we spread as much as we can,” Soulsby said.
Black Baccara hybrid tea (Rosa ‘MEIdebenne’)
Rose Scents Although their fragrance is sometimes indescribable, many roses, especially old garden varieties grown before 1867, fill the air on warm summer mornings with a variety of scents. Pop your nose into a rose blossom and you may discover a hint of cloves, anise, citrus, honey, or pears. Or, perhaps one flower reminds you of apricots, while another exudes a trace of lemon. When the tea roses are blooming, you might detect a trace of sweet orange pekoe tea in the air. Like fine wines, roses often feature a fascinating, complex collection of sweet smells.
Rose breeder William Radler is a consulting rosarian for the Krasberg Rose Garden. He developed the wildly popular KnockOut® series of shrub roses, which are also on display. “Will has been breeding roses for our area, along with other breeders, for a long time,” said Soulsby. The rosarian meets annually with Soulsby and other Garden staff to review the rose collection. This year, Radler will receive the 2015 Hutchinson Medal, which recognizes “outstanding leadership or professional accomplishment that has been significant in furthering horticulture, plant science, or conservation.”
Some of the roses have celebrated a 30-year reign since the Rose Garden opened, but others have been replaced over the years. “We constantly evaluate the rose garden; a plant may not perform to its full potential here. However, the need to change out roses is pretty minimal overall,” Soulsby said.
Although it’s difficult for him to name favorites, the Mr. Lincoln rose (Rosa ‘Mr. Lincoln’) tops Soulsby’s list. “I tend to favor hybrid tea roses,” he admitted. “There’s also ‘Olympiad’ and ‘Peace’ [see lore, below], but my favorites? It depends on the day.”
Soulsby calls June and September the “rock star” months for the Krasberg Rose Garden. “The best viewing time is around Father’s Day for the first flush of major blooms, and then again in mid-September through early October.” But there’s almost always something interesting to see. Flowering can begin as early as April, and there are even a few blooms in November. Come winter, according to Soulsby, there’s a lot of structural interest with the conifers and shrub roses silhouetted against—or accented with—fallen snow.
Long may the queen of flowers reign!
The Krasberg Rose Garden in summer
The Lore of the Roses
In ancient Greek mythology, the goddess Chloris (Roman counterpart: Flora) came upon the body of a lovely wood nymph one day, and asked other gods to help her change it into a flower. Aphrodite donated some of her beauty; the Three Graces bestowed qualities of brilliance, joy, and allure; and Dionysus provided fragrant nectar. When the nymph’s transformation into a flower was complete, Chloris proclaimed it the rose, queen of all flowers.
The rose was said to have bloomed without thorns in the Garden of Eden, but grew them after Adam and Eve were driven out of paradise as a reminder to man of his sinful nature. Inside and outside a religious sphere, roses have represented virginity and purity (white) and passion and martyrdom (red).
During the Middle Ages, the color of roses stood for different heraldic houses, such as the House of Lancaster (red) and the house of York (white), who fought in the War of the Roses (1455–85). At war’s end, after the houses were blended in marriage, a red-and-white striped Tudor rose became the national symbol of England and, eventually, its national flower.
The rose has long featured in literature, from Dante’s Inferno to the sonnets and plays of William Shakespeare, from William Faulkner’s short story A Rose for Emily to Umberto Eco’s novel The Name of the Rose, and many more.
Empress Josephine Bonaparte, wife of Napoleon, in the late eighteenth century sponsored the development of rose breeding at her gardens outside of Paris, where she reigned over more than 250 types of roses.
In World War II, while Americans grew victory gardens, the Peace rose(Rosa ‘Madame A. Meilland’) almost became a casualty when Nazis invaded the Lyon, France, home of breeder Francis Meilland. He smuggled the ivory-yellow hybrid tea rose out of Europe in 1940 to the protection of his business partner, Robert Pyle, of West Grove, Pennsylvania. Pyle continued its propagation, introducing the rose to the public at war’s end. The enduringly popular Peace rose is arguably the most popular in the world today.
This post was adapted from an article by Nina Koziol that appeared in the spring 2015 edition of Keep Growing, the member magazine of the Chicago Botanic Garden.
Two years ago—before his life took a head-spinning turn—Fernando Orozco was a 19-year-old juvenile offender in the Cook County Sheriff’s detention center. Recently, he completed work as a grower and crew leader on the Kraft Food campus in Northfield, Illinois, as part of a 13-week stint in Windy City Harvest Corps, an educational and transitional jobs program run by the Chicago Botanic Garden.
Fernando Orozco at the Kraft Makers Garden
“I never thought I’d have a job like this where I have my own site and, not only that, the responsibility of caring for a crew of other guys,” Orozco said, on a break from work last summer in the 8,000-square-foot Kraft Makers Garden.
His crew included young men, ages 17 to 21, in the Illinois Department of Juvenile Justice system. The team grew enough tomatoes, peppers, lettuce, and other produce to fill 55 boxes a week for the U.S. Department of Agriculture’s Women, Infants, and Children (WIC) supplemental nutrition program. Other crops included cherries, beets, swiss chard, and watermelon, made pretty with plantings of scarlet runner beans and firecracker flowers, all grown in full view of Kraft employees as they worked out in the company gym. Produce from the site is donated to WIC centers and food pantries in the networks of the Greater Chicago Food Depository.
Orozco became interested in farming at the sheriff’s detention center, where he learned basic growing and organic practices in a program run by Windy City Harvest, the Chicago Botanic Garden’s urban agriculture education and jobs-training initiative. He went on to complete the nine-month Windy City Harvest Apprenticeship program, earned a certificate in safe and sustainable urban agriculture, and interned at locations including chef Rick Bayless’s home garden in Chicago.
The Windy City Harvest Apprenticeship program attracts a diverse group of students, including young adults with a history of incarceration and those with significant barriers to employment. “Just because they’re checking that box that says ‘felony offense’ doesn’t necessarily mean that they’re bad people,” said Angela Mason, director of Windy City Harvest. “They just need someone to give them a chance and support them through those changes. ”
Using organic methods and operating on eight acres at a dozen locations throughout Chicago and Lake County, Windy City Harvest students annually grow about 100,000 pounds of fruits and vegetables, serving an estimated 143,000 people.
Now Orozco tells the former juvenile offenders with whom he works that they can leave their past behind. “I’m not the smartest person in the world,” he tells them, “but I saw an opportunity and I took it, and the same opportunity is happening to you guys. Are you going to take advantage?”
Orozco hopes to run his own farm some day. “But, for now, I’d be happy if I were here, doing the same thing, just perfecting the craft, growing food and helping people, growing people,” he said. “I can’t ask for a better job.”
This post was adapted from an article by Helen K. Marshall that appeared in the winter 2014 edition of Keep Growing, the member magazine of the Chicago Botanic Garden.
At first, the tree-shaded ravines near Lake Michigan look inviting, a place of filtered sunlight in the Chicago area’s North Shore. But the ravines—with homes built on the bluffs above them—are in trouble.
Overgrown with invasive plants that block the sun, the ravines are losing the native plants that help keep their soil from washing into Lake Michigan. Although some erosion is natural, the rate of erosion is accelerating, partly because of runoff from urban areas atop the ravines. The Chicago Botanic Garden and the Park District of Highland Park have stepped in to try to keep the ravines from crumbling any further.
“These are systems that have been beaten up for a long time,” said Rebecca Grill, natural areas manager for the Park District of Highland Park.
Millard Park is one of the many Lake County ravines that face challenges from erosion.
The Garden and the Park District have put together a scientific research and “ravine trauma” team to help reestablish native plant cover that will slow surface erosion. The team is developing a mix of native seeds that private landowners can sow to help restore vegetation to the slopes of ravine and bluff properties. The seeds will be sold commercially. In addition, the team will provide homeowners with a guide on how to care for the native plants.
“The Garden has a responsibility to partner with our neighboring communities to conserve and protect oases of biodiversity such as those found within the Lake Michigan ravines,” said Bob Kirschner, the Garden’s director of restoration ecology and Woman’s Board Curator of Aquatic Plant and Urban Lake Studies. “We’re pleased to be able to pair our ecologists’ knowledge with the Park District of Highland Park’s progressive approach of helping landowners help themselves.”
The project team includes Garden ecologist Jim Steffen. With 25 years of experience, Steffen has worked on other Lake County ravines, where the lake’s cooler, damper air is funneled to create a microclimate not found anywhere in Illinois. (The ravines also are home to some of the state’s rarest plants.) As part of the project, Steffen helped design a seed-trial experiment and develop potential seed mixes.
Garden ecologist Jim Steffen in the field
For the next three years, the seed mixes will be tested in plots within Highland Park’s Millard Park, one of the district’s four lakefront parks with ravines adjacent to Lake Michigan. (Check pdhp.org for more information.)
After that, the next step will be up to homeowners near the ravines. “We hope to build a better awareness about the potential they have to regenerate the diversity of native plants,” said Grill.
This post was adapted from an article by Helen Marshall that appeared in the summer 2014 edition of Keep Growing, the member magazine of the Chicago Botanic Garden.
