By: Sue Markgraf

When growers, designers and contractors collaborate from the get-go, beautiful things grow. The new landscape at the Obama Presidential Center in Chicago is a perfect example.

Across the 19.3-acre campus, diverse botanical selections grown by numerous plant nurseries showcase the power of integration. Green-industry partners collaborated on every phase, from planning to planting. Featuring hundreds of thousands of plants, the cross-trade team co-engineered a resilient landscape that serves as both a public destination and a working laboratory for naturalistic urban design.

A vital part of this botanical achievement — which includes a vast scope of groundcovers, turfgrasses and more than 44,000 perennials — is Midwest Groundcovers. The wholesale nursery in St. Charles, Illinois, managed a significant portion of the plant production and supply.

“On a historic scale, it is probably the biggest project we’ve done,” says Nikki Melin, the nursery’s vice president of sales and marketing.

The growth process
The growth process required intense business discipline, risk management and coordinated communications. Midwest Groundcovers submitted a bid for the project in 2022. In 2024, Semper Fi Land Inc., a landscape construction and ecological restoration firm in Yorkville, Illinois, presented the nursery with a contract.

Midwest Groundcovers internally propagates about 85% of its plants from established stock. However, landscape design requirements for the Obama Presidential Center meant the nursery needed to outsource a number of specialty plants outside of its inventory. To reduce any potential financial risk, company leadership included a strict down-payment policy and clear contractual terms covering cancellation and overwintering costs.

“We made a very hardline decision that we would not start growing for this project until we received that down payment,” Melin says. “Negotiating and working on the contract took a while and it did delay our growing season, but it all turned out fine.”

Managing production during high season required flawless organization. The nursery kept the project’s inventory in designated growing shelters, separate from its regular wholesale stock. Sales, production and inventory teams held cross-departmental meetings once a week to review the master plant list and send weekly growing updates to Semper Fi.

“We started sending the weekly updates well ahead of shipping — updates on how the plants were coming along, developing,” Melin says. “We reported any issues very early on in the process so we could pivot quickly.”

Unexpected challenges tested the entire process. The original construction timeline scheduled plant installation for the fall of 2024. The goal was to have plants ready within a compact, six-month window. However, large-scale construction delays pushed plant installation to this past spring, from April through June. This change forced the nursery to overwinter tens of thousands of young plants and deliver products during the normal busy season.

“We were nervous about overwintering plants we were unfamiliar with, unsure of how they would do,” Melin says. “In order for us to be successful, we had to be overly organized.”

The civic site plant palette
The plant palette at the Obama Presidential Center balances regional ecology with climate resilience. To achieve this, several regional nurseries (see sidebar on page 16) grew a variety of native, structural, and uncommon cultivars.

Canopy and understory trees: Acer saccharum (sugar maple), Amelanchier laevis (Allegheny serviceberry), Carya ovata (shagbark hickory), Cercis canadensis (Eastern redbud), Celtis occidentalis (common hackberry), Gymnocladus dioicus (Kentucky coffeetree), Quercus alba (white oak), Q. bicolor (swamp white oak), Q. macrocarpa (bur oak), Q. imbricaria (shingle oak), Taxodium distichum (bald cypress)

Woody shrubs: Cephalanthus occidentalis (buttonbush), Ceonanthus americanus (New Jersey tea), Clethra alnifolia (clethra), Cornus sericea (red osier dogwood), Diervilla lonicera (Northern bush honeysuckle), Fothergilla gardenia (dwarf witch-alder), Hamamelis virginiana (witch hazel), Ilex verticillata (winterberry), Itea virginica (Virginia sweetspire), Rhus aromatica ‘Gro-Low’ (fragrant sumac), Rubus odoratus (purple-flowering raspberry), Salix discolor (pussy willow), Sambucuscanadensis (American black elderberry), Viburnum lentago (nannyberry)

Perennials and wildflowers: Amsonia tabernaemontana (Eastern bluestar), Anaphalis margaritacea (pearly everlasting), Asclepias sullivantii (prairie milkweed), A. verticillata (whorled milkweed), Aster herveyi (Hervey’s aster), Echinacea pallida (pale purple coneflower), E. paradoxa (yellow coneflower), Monarda bradburiana (Bradbury’s monarda), Penstemon digitalis (foxglove beardtongue), Phlox pilosa (prairie phlox), Tiarella cordifolia (foam flower)

Grasses, sedges and ferns: Carex pensylvanica (Pennsylvania sedge), C. rosea (rosey sedge), Panicum virgatum (switchgrass), Polystichum acrostichoides (Christmas fern), Schizachyrium scoparium (little bluestem), Sporobolus heterolepis (prairie dropseed)

Community by design
Matthew Bird, principal and landscape architect at Brooklyn-based Michael Van Valkenburgh Associates, helped guide the project’s site planning and design. The campus rejects the feel of a traditional museum, he explains. Instead, it integrates with the surrounding South Side neighborhood and historic Jackson Park, originally designed by Frederick Law Olmsted.

The landscape honors two distinct cultural environments. The western edge faces the neighborhood and is designed as a civic and urban border that provides open areas for public gatherings. With dense plantings designed to make visitors feel nestled within a quiet parkland, the eastern edge faces the historic Jackson Park Lagoon.

Active community spaces drive the layout. A good example of this is the Eleanor Roosevelt Fruit & Vegetable Garden, reviewed by former First Lady Michelle Obama. Operated by the Chicago Botanic Garden, it visually demonstrates techniques for growing food and provides fresh crops for the center’s cafes and local food banks.

Partnerships in action
Early collaborations were essential in bringing the complex civic vision to life. Jessica Gonzalez, senior designer and horticulturist at Chicago-based Living Habitats, was part of the local design team. She led the early crop approvals at Midwest Groundcovers, paying special attention to top growth and root development.

“For the project’s planting schedule, it was important to review the quantity and quality of each species long before delivery to reduce supply issues that would cause delays,” Gonzalez says.

Construction of the center’s campus required continuous adjustments because of its architectural complexity. Major portions of the landscape sit on intensive green roof structures, including a 400-car parking garage, a Chicago Public Library branch and a public forum building.

“This site was extremely complex to work on throughout the entire planting process given there were so many trades that needed to align and complete their work prior to beds being ready for plant layout,” Gonzalez says. “There was not a one-size-fits-all layout situation, so the team used our shared expertise to make adjustments for long-term species success.”

Testing regional resilience
The design intentionally pushes botanical boundaries to build historical continuity and climate resilience. The plant palette honors regional ecology while preparing the urban landscape for future temperature shifts.

“We like to push in our practice,” Bird says. “Our planting design really has a great diversity of species, so it allows us to experiment with plants that may not be as common, but we think will do well in the region. Thinking about climate change, we push the boundaries for plants that may over time be a little more resilient than even some of the native species.”

Midwest Groundcovers found that specialized varieties, such as European poppies and Molinia and Sanguisorba cultivars, were absent from the domestic wholesale market. When certain plants proved impossible to source, the close relationship between the nursery and the landscape architects saved the design intent. The teams collaborated to find visual and structural substitutes.

“Matthew Bird was super communicative, easy to work with and it was fairly easy to move forward with substitutions whenever we couldn’t find source plants,” Melin says. “We would come back with choices, and the architect would tell us if he was looking for a darker flower or more height, so we could present a different set of choices.”

Layout required careful handling of unique plants. Living Habitats worked with installers to place taller species back from the sidewalks and group identical plants for visual impact. This makes the landscape’s naturalistic design feel intentional and cared for in the urban civic setting.

“Living Habitats specializes in applying native species that may be unfamiliar or rarely seen in traditional landscapes by using their physical characteristics to best advantage,” Gonzalez says. “By including native species more broadly in our cultural landscapes we not only improve a site’s sustainability, but we can also better support immediately adjacent natural areas.”

Lessons for industry
For Midwest Groundcovers, the collaborative experience provided a clear blueprint for future marketing and operational growth. The company learned critical structural lessons from a previous trial project, where a lack of frequent client communications hampered success. This collaboration right from the start highlighted the profound impact wholesale growers can have on legacy spaces.

By implementing a weekly communications process, the nursery proved that hyper-organization kept complex plant grows on track during peak shipping seasons. The nursery’s leadership views the project as a milestone for its business and the region.

“It is a privilege to be a supplier and to contribute to the success of such a prestigious and meaningful project as the Obama Presidential Center,” says Christa Orum-Keller, president and board chair at Midwest Groundcovers. “We are proud of our work. The Center and all it brings to our region is a beacon of hope and encouragement in challenging times and we are grateful to be a part of it.”

Successfully building active collaborations before a project breaks ground offers exciting opportunities for business growth and brand marketing. Direct conversations help spot emerging trends and customer preferences. At the same time, on-site trials allow testing of how plants perform outside their native regions.

This level of collaboration can influence cost-effective business decisions before landscape designs are finalized. It ensures the grower’s operational bottom line is protected and the landscape architect’s aesthetic vision is realized.

Midwest Groundcovers is transforming its marketing strategy as a result of this experience. In addition to launching a podcast series that explores these topics, the nursery now has staff dedicated to collaborative outreach. Team members are leading professional education workshops and lunch-and-learn sessions with landscape design firms.

Whenever you’re in Chicago, go see it. The Obama Presidential Center’s landscape proves that when growers, designers and contractors collaborate from the start of a project — everyone grows together.