A long-term vision to grow a botanical garden at Ellis-Porter Riverside Park in Jefferson City is rooted in a recently completed master plan.
The large-scale, multi-million-dollar project, which is laid out in a 156-page plan created Arbolope Studio, a St. Louis-based landscape architecture, urban design and public art practice, in collaboration with The Architects Alliance, was presented to the Jefferson City Parks and Recreation Commission last week.
The botanical garden has developed as a partnership between the Jefferson City Parks, Recreation and Forestry Department and the Central Missouri Master Gardeners. Both were involved in the plan's creation.
Elements included in the master plan won't automatically be included in whatever development occurs at the park, but it will serve as a guide to what the garden could be.
Parks Department Director Todd Spalding told the commission the plan isn't meant to happen all at once.
"We hope that this is almost a 50-year plan, if you will," Spalding said. "The area behind the caretaker's residence is very exciting, and that in itself will provide us with a wonderful botanical garden. But we have so much property there that is under-developed. Basically the entire park becomes joined together."
The gardens
The plan lays out a botanical garden that would cover a large portion of the park, incorporating existing buildings like the Caretaker's House and the in-progress amphitheater.
There would be three major types of garden - native Missouri geographic gardens, Missouri productive gardens, and ornamental and cultural gardens.
The Caretaker's House would become the heart of the garden. Centered around it and the other buildings on the site would be the ornamental and cultural gardens.
A children's garden, conifer garden, gathering lawn, sensory garden and reflection garden are included in examples of this type of garden. They are meant to be more decorative and cultivated examples of how humans interact with our landscape, according to the plan.
These gardens would likely be more high-intensity maintenance gardens, which will be primarily managed by the Master Gardeners volunteer group.
Branching from the Caretaker's House to the north and south would be a band of native Missouri geographic gardens - glades, wetlands, prairie, savanna and woodland gardens to showcase different types of native plants in the state.
From east to west, a band of Missouri productive plants would highlight agriculture and include foraging trials, an ornamental edible garden, community orchard and plant nurseries.
Working tree and shrub nurseries would be used to provide plants for the garden, the Master Gardeners and the Parks Department.
Buildings on the site would serve as anchors throughout the garden.
The plan includes renovation of the Caretaker's House, which was built in the early 1900s.
Spalding said the building is currently operational, but the department plans to renovate it into a usable small event space with a catering kitchen and restrooms. The upper floors would house office space, a conference room and storage space.
The plan also includes construction of a new visitor center on the site where four sunken handball courts currently exist.
The new amphitheater and an existing pavilion would also be anchors for the park.
Throughout the gardens, the plan incorporates smaller and more frequent areas called "nodes" - varying from small bench nooks to medium-sized gathering areas. The nodes would be distributed regularly along the paths in each garden area to provide opportunities for rest and observation.
The plan outlines many styles of nodes, adjusted to the topography and theme of the garden area they would be located in.
On the west side of the park, four greenhouses would be built for the Master Gardeners. The partnership for the project came about, in part, after the group's current space at Quigg Commons was damaged by flooding in spring 2019.
The four new greenhouses would also give them more space - increasing their greenhouse footprint from about 4,500 square feet to more than 12,000 square feet.
The phases and costs
The master plan is a long-term outlook of the development of the botanical garden, establishing six phases of development.
The core of the project and the first phase are set to be the renovation of the Caretaker's House and establishing the gardens around that area.
"The beauty of this plan is we're going to start small," Spalding said. "We're going to start with minimal dollars spent with the area around the caretaker's place, and at the end of the day, if that's all we get, I think it would be a wonderful addition."
One element of the first phase could happen relatively soon, Spalding said. The Master Gardeners and Parks Department are working to relocate a collection of conifers from the Quigg Commons site to Ellis-Porter.
The conifers would eventually become part of the larger botanical garden map. Spalding said they are working on an inventory of the trees and figuring out when they could be transplanted to the new site.
"Some we think we can do this winter, some will probably wait until spring, and some might be in the fall," Spalding said.
The plan also breaks down estimated costs of each phase, if all elements are included.
Phase one is estimated to cost about $2 million, plus $400,000 for renovation of the Caretaker's House.
The following phases begin to expand the garden out from that center stage, introducing further areas of gardens in a mixture of the three main types - native, productive and ornamental.
Earlier phases will grow the garden out toward the north, then east to the pavilion, then south. Phase three includes a renovation to the existing pavilion, and the visitor center would come in phase four.
Without the cost of buildings, the six phases are estimated to cost $2 million, $1.2 million, $1.4 million, $1.2 million, $1.1 million and $175,000, respectively.
Renovation of the pavilion would cost $200,000, construction of the visitors center comes in at $550,000, and construction of the new greenhouses is estimated at $600,000.
In total, including all six phases and all building renovations or constructions, the plan is estimated to cost $8,948,878.
Moving forward
The Parks and Recreation Commission on Tuesday decided to take more time to go over the master plan and will likely reintroduce the topic during its January meeting.
The commission can approve the plan as a concept, but that will not approve any action to take place or funding use.
The Master Gardeners are also reviewing the plan and will give their approval, Spalding said.
"Then our groups are going to get together and kind of lay out an action plan of what our expectations are of each other," he said.
Spalding said the plan is meant to start small. Much of the first stages will likely be done with in-house labor and existing plant material.
"Botanical gardens have the ability to really make a difference in a community and really change what a community looks like," Spalding said. "The beauty of this is we can start really small and just kind of watch it grow."