Landscape architect Clifford Miller and historian David Wendell are standing at the edge of a clearing in a wooded yard in Highland Park having a polite disagreement about whether this is a good example of the genius of Jens Jensen. Wendell thinks it is. He points to the open area, the curving lines, the stepped border culminating in a row of evergreens. Miller looks at the same manicured lawn and border, the same wall of hemlock and Austrian pine, and takes exception. “All of that is new,” he says. “The majority of the plants are not native. The majority are organized in ways that are a little too cute.” Turning to a small patch of land near the garage, he adds, “This is Jensen. This is the rambling looseness and irregularity of a Jensen-esque landscape.” The yard belongs to the house and studio where Jensen, creator of Columbus Park, the Garfield Park Conservatory, and the Cook County forest preserves, dreamed up some of the nation’s most celebrated gardens. The patch, all wildflower foliage and shrubs, looks like something the current gardener forgot.
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In 1908 Jensen bought four acres of wooded property in the Ravinia area of Highland Park, which he called the Clearing. He built a shingled summer home on it for his family and created a landscape that included two of his signature touches: the sunny opening that Miller and Wendell agree still has a Jensen-like shape, and a council ring of limestone slabs, still tucked into the side of a ravine. In 1918 he began using the summerhouse as his office. In the early 20s, when his daughter Edith and her husband (his pupil and successor, Marshall Johnson) moved into the house, he built a small studio on the edge of the ravine, near the garage. He worked in these tiny quarters until 1935, when he moved to Door County to found a “school of the soil” also called the Clearing. He died in 1951.
