Lincoln Memorial Garden
Near Springfield, Illinois
On the eastern shore of Lake Springfield sits a hundred-acre woodland garden that was designed as a living biography. The idea came from Harriet Knudson of the Springfield Civic Garden Club, who proposed in the early nineteen thirties that Lincoln's adopted home should have a native-plant memorial to match him. She hired landscape architect Jens Jensen, a Prairie School designer who had worked with Frank Lloyd Wright, to lay out the paths and plantings.
Jensen specified that only trees, shrubs, and wildflowers native to Illinois, Indiana, and Kentucky, the three states Lincoln called home, could be planted here. The first acorns went into the ground on November fourteenth, nineteen thirty-six, planted by Boy Scouts and Girl Scouts. The garden has been open since and remains one of the quieter monuments to Lincoln in a city full of them.
