The display gardens at Ball Horticultural Company’s home office in West Chicago have been the evaluation and testing grounds for plants from leading breeders and marketers from around the world for more than 80 years. Read this article for free: Already have an account? To continue reading, please subscribe: * The display gardens at Ball Horticultural Company’s home office in West Chicago have been the evaluation and testing grounds for plants from leading breeders and marketers from around the world for more than 80 years. Read unlimited articles for free today: Already have an account? The display gardens at Ball Horticultural Company’s home office in West Chicago have been the evaluation and testing grounds for plants from leading breeders and marketers from around the world for more than 80 years.
The gardens span 3.6 hectares of beds and containers filled with annual, perennial and vegetable varieties that undergo rigorous evaluation, including the newest plant varieties that will be at retail garden centres for the very first time. When I was invited to visit the gardens at Ball this summer along with other garden writers from across North America, I packed a sun umbrella.
The forecast called for extreme heat and my expectation was that I would be visiting a typical trial garden with row upon row of varieties planted beneath the blistering sun. But what started out in 1933 and continued for several decades as a row trial garden at Ball is today an extraordinary park-like setting — a growing, living catalogue that cultivates not only awareness and knowledge of new and upcoming plant varieties but also inspires innovative design ideas for home gardens through a dazzling series of garden rooms. Colleen Zacharias / Free Press Large pond boxes filled to the brim with flowering annuals can be re-created at home on a smaller scale.
“It really kickstarted in our centennial year [2005] when Anna Ball, president and CEO of Ball Horticultural Company, brought in Hoerr Schaudt Landscape Architects to really revitalize the gardens,” said Katie Rotella, senior public relations and digital manager at Ball. “Before that time it really did look like a row trial garden — it was flat, it was a lot of fields, no elevations, it felt really cold.” Walking through Ball’s display gardens along meandering pea gravel pathways is an immersive experience.
There is breathtaking beauty at every turn. One of the first areas I came to was an outdoor covered patio flanked by multiple ponds with floating pond boxes. The boxes were filled to the brim with flowering annuals including lantana, petchoa, celosia, gomphrena, grasses and canna lilies.
Landon Gibbs, display gardens horticulturist, who designed the displays, said that the plant material is chosen based on criteria such as new releases to the market, top sellers or high performers. “I often mix things in that I know will look good or play well with those priority products or new releases,” he said. “Therefore, most anything that one may put into a typical container display should perform well as long as proper watering is done.
” The boxes are about a metre wide and 25 centimetres deep. They are made from a composite decking material and hand-watered all season. The boxes have been set on cinder blocks and kept approximately five centimetres off the top of the water, said Gibbs, to give them a floating appearance.
“We line them with permeable cloth and fill them with potting soil. We used a slow release fertilizer because I did not want to get liquid fertilizer into the pond when water needed to be applied.” Colleen Zacharias / Free Press A mass planting of ornamental grasses is both inviting and beautiful for its seasonality.
This is an important consideration, said Gibbs, because excessive fertilizer can leach into a pond and create issues with algae. The pond boxes are replicable on a smaller scale. Instead of cinder blocks, they could be elevated on some other type of pedestal.
“We used a fish-friendly dye for our water,” said Rotella. “The boxes look like a piece of art floating on a neutral black background that also has water lilies and Koi fish.” Simply sublime.
Large containers abound throughout the display gardens at Ball. It might be a lone container standing within a sea of ornamental grasses or set among a border, but each one makes a design statement. “I always think of scale when I’m looking at large containers,” says Gibbs.
“The scale could be so much larger than what people often think.” Colleen Zacharias / Free Press Stacked stone walls at the gardens at Ball have an old world charm and an attractive plant selection. Gibbs says it is important to not be afraid to play with height in containers.
If you have a container that is four feet (1.2 m) tall, said Gibbs, select plants that will grow to at least 1.2 or 1.
5 metres tall within that container by the end of the season. “Because it gives you that really big scale that’s going to create the impact that you want,” he said. “If you have a four-foot tall container and you only put plants in it that are two feet tall, then you’re looking more at the pot than the plant display.
” Some of the most dramatic mixed container solutions that I saw at Ball featured colocasias (elephant ears) accented by colourful coleus, hypoestes (the polka dot plant), and vigorous trailing plants such as Lysimachia Creeping Jenny. Tall varieties of gomphrena (globe amaranth) and Cyperus King Tut were also used to great effect in many of the container displays I admired. Along curving pea gravel pathways with a dense backdrop of mature trees, there are long retaining walls of stacked stone reminiscent of old world stone walls built by skilled masons who shaped each stone.
I was captivated by the design of the wall but also by the selection of plants. In one area, along the front edge, Lysimachia Goldilocks forms a low-growing mat of golden foliage. Accents include Lantana Lucky White, blue-flowered Salvia Mystic spires, Interspecific Impatiens Solarscape White Pearl which is new for 2025, and Ageratum Monarch Magic, also new for 2025.
Plant components are chosen for strong performance, colour, texture, shape, low maintenance and ability to attract pollinators. This attractive selection scores high on all points. Monthly What you need to know now about gardening in Winnipeg.
An email with advice, ideas and tips to keep your outdoor and indoor plants growing. One of the design elements that created perhaps the greatest impression on me was the use of ornamental grasses. They are planted in great sweeps throughout the display gardens.
Grasses are sometimes discounted, said Gibbs. “In the beginning of the season, grasses don’t have as much impact but at this time of year when they are all blooming and the sun is coming through them, everybody loves them.” It’s about convincing gardeners and landscapers that there is a seasonality to plantings and that there is beauty in that seasonality, said Gibbs.
Instead of planting just one type of perennial en masse along the edges of a pea gravel pathway just outside the café area, the designers selected a diverse mix to show the different ways plants can grow in and around gravel. The selection includes textural plants such as lamb’s-ear, sporobolus prairie dropseed, ornamental onion and dwarf mugo pine. Growers flock to the gardens at Ball so they can make decisions about new plants that are soon to be released to the market.
But the many visitors also include people who are seeking design inspiration such as landscape designers and horticulturists who work at botanical gardens, parks or municipalities. In addition, garden writers, master gardener groups and garden clubs also tour the gardens. One visit isn’t enough, however, because the gardens are constantly evolving.
Colleen Zacharias / Free Press To achieve scale, match large plants with large containers, as in this one filled with colocasia, coleus, polka dot plant and lysimachia. “We rip out at least eight acres of plants every year,” said Rotella, “because every year we launch hundreds of new plants. We want to give visitors something new to look at.
” Colleen Zacharias writes about many aspects of gardening including trends, plant recommendations, and how-to information that is uniquely relevant to Prairie gardeners. She has written a column for the since 2010 and pens the monthly newsletter . .
Every piece of reporting Colleen produces is reviewed by an editing team before it is posted online or published in print — part of the ‘s tradition, since 1872, of producing reliable independent journalism. Read more about , and . Our newsroom depends on a growing audience of readers to power our journalism.
If you are not a paid reader, please consider . Our newsroom depends on its audience of readers to power our journalism. Thank you for your support.
Colleen Zacharias writes about many aspects of gardening including trends, plant recommendations, and how-to information that is uniquely relevant to Prairie gardeners. She has written a column for the since 2010 and pens the monthly newsletter . .
Every piece of reporting Colleen produces is reviewed by an editing team before it is posted online or published in print — part of the ‘s tradition, since 1872, of producing reliable independent journalism. Read more about , and . Our newsroom depends on a growing audience of readers to power our journalism.
If you are not a paid reader, please consider . Our newsroom depends on its audience of readers to power our journalism. Thank you for your support.
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