Built On A Boneyard, Botanic Gardens Is 70

The headquarters at 9th and York Street is a designated Denver Landmark and National Register property. Photos courtesy of Tom Noel One of the concrete “trees” inside the gardens, with globe-light “fruits.” The iconic concrete conservatory, designed by Victor Hornbein and Edward D. White, Jr., opened in 1966.

Birth Of The Gardens

Built On A Boneyard, Denver Botanic Gardens Has Grown To 40 Gardens Over 70 Seasons

By Thomas J. Noel

Special to the GPHN

Established in 1951, Denver Botanic Gardens (DBG) has grown from a small group of horticulturally minded citizens into a major civic organization.

With a prominent conservatory and core city gardens at 9th and York Street, complemented by a 750-acre suburban campus southwest of Denver, DBG has become the nation’s most-visited botanic gardens.

From an original collection of mostly native plants, it has expanded to include plant material from all over the world in more than 40 different gardens.

The old City Cemetery

DBG’s main York Street site occupies an area fertilized by the Catholic section of the original city cemetery. William H. Larimer Jr., who founded Denver in 1858, established the cemetery a year later. The city acquired most of the property in 1872 and ran it as City Cemetery.

In the late nineteenth century, City Cemetery increasingly lost customers to newer cemeteries, including Riverside (1876), Fairmount (1890) and Mount Olivet (1890). In 1890 the city converted much of the site to Congress Park, the larger western portion of which was reorganized in 1910 as Cheesman Park.

Mount Calvary Catholic Cemetery continued to operate on the original site until 1950, when the City of Denver bought the 18-acre burial ground and agreed to remove its roughly 6,000 bodies.

An estimated several hundred bodies still lie under the gardens and Cheesman Park to the west. During recent construction at the gardens, about 50 bodies were unearthed and respectfully reburied.

Rose gardens and lily ponds

Incorporated Feb. 3, 1951, DBG started out with rose gardens and water lily ponds of the south side of the Denver Museum of Nature and Science in City Park, just west of Park Hill.

In 1957 DBG leased from the U.S. Forest Service the 169-acre Mt. Goliath Alpine Study Area on the Mount Evans Highway in the mountains about 50 miles northwest of Denver. A two-mile nature trail meanders through this rare forest of 1,500-yearold bristlecone pines, a prime timberline attraction to this day.

In 1958 Ruth and James Waring purchased the Denver mansion at 909 York St. to give to DBG as its headquarters. Designed by Jules Jacques Benoit Benedict, the large two-story residence had been built in 1926. Now a designated Denver Landmark and National Register property, it is a cornerstone of the Morgan’s Addition Historic District.

Next to the new headquarters, in 1958 DBG began to transform the city-owned grounds of the old Catholic cemetery into gardens. Nationally prominent San Francisco landscape architect Garrett Eckbo planned the gardens with water features and plantings that have grown to include Colorado high plains, rose, and vegetable gardens as well as Saco DeBoer’s Rocky Mountain Garden.

The Japanese Gardens, designed by Koichi Kawana, opened in 1979. The adjacent Bill Hosokawa Bonsai Pavilion, honoring a Denver Post editor and leader of the Colorado Japanese community, opened in 2012. A Home Demonstration Garden offers suggestions for home gardeners, while the world’s first Xeriscape Demonstration Garden opened in 1987 to showcase lowwater gardening.

The Conservancy and Chatfield site

The Boettcher Foundation, whose money came in large part from the Ideal Cement Company, funded much of DBG’s construction and encouraged use of concrete throughout. Even the lamp posts are concrete “trees” with globe lights posing as fruits.

Concrete is used in the gardens’ signature building, the Edna C. and Claude K. Boettcher Memorial Conservatory. Opened in 1966, the conservatory was designed by Denver architects Victor Hornbein and Edward D. White, Jr.

Their highly original design uses faceted plexiglas panels between interlaced cast-inplace concrete arches soaring 50 feet above tropical trees. The panels are sloped to prevent condensation from raining on visitors. Inside, in a humid, warm climate, some 600 species are cultivated amid waterfalls and pools constructed in a sloped, naturalistic environment.

In 1973 DBG leased a 750-acre nature preserve southwest of Denver from the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers. The Corps had acquired the site along Deer Creek as part of its floodplain for the Chatfield Dam, reservoir, and state park built after Denver’s disastrous 1965 flood. The Corps leased the land to DBG on the condition that it remains as a natural area, including wetlands along Deer Creek accessible by hiking trails.

The Chatfield site opened to the public in 1988. The complex includes the 1886 Deer Creek School House as well as two working historic farms. The Hildebrand Farm complex, dating to 1866, is a National Register site consisting of a farmhouse, dairy barn, granary, ice house, working blacksmith shop, and other outbuildings.

It and the neighboring Green Farm have been restored as a working farm and interpretive center. The nearby 1886 one-room schoolhouse has been restored for educational purposes. Chatfield hosts a popular fall corn maze and pumpkin festival as well as holiday lights. Rotating sculpture exhibits and lavender and other gardens adorn the site.

Music, lights, and growth

Since 1980, DBG has used its grassy, sunken amphitheater at its York Street site for a sold-out summer concert series. Every winter since 1989, Blossoms of Lights attracts crowds to a spectacular holiday show of shrubs and trees decorated with more than 250,000 colored electric lights. In 2019 Blossoms attracted 145,406 visitors and brought in $1.6 million in revenue.

In 2007 Denver architect David Tryba helped DBG handle its growing need to handle more visitors with a $45 million expansion. Tryba’s work included a new Bonfils-Stanton entrance and gift shop and a three-level parking garage. Inside the gardens, a new greenhouse complex with 12 greenhouses visible to the public along a long exhibit space known as the Orangery.

Most recently, the $40 million FreyerNewman Center for Science, Art, and Education opened on York Street in 2020. Designed by the Denver firm of Davis Partnership, the building includes a 277seat auditorium, six classrooms, three art galleries, a coffee shop, laboratories, and spacious new homes for the Kathryn Kalmbach Herbarium and Helen Fowler Library.

Two stories of underground parking at the new building serve staff and the DBG’s small army of some 3,000 volunteers, freeing up the older garage for visitors. The Freyer-Newman Center is the last piece of a $116 million, 13-year masterplan that, under CEO Brian Vogt, has catapulted DBG into the top tier of botanic gardens.

Historian Tom Noel, known as Dr. Colorado, is the author of more than 50 books about Denver and Colorado, including the history of the Park Hill neighborhood. He lives in the nearby neighborhood of Montclair. For tours, talks, books and other info, check dr-colorado.com.

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