Book review: “Jens Jensen: Nature’s Artist” by William H. Tishler

Denmark-born Jens Jensen arrived in Chicago in 1885 in his mid-twenties, still trying to find his way in the world, and soon landed a job as a day laborer in Humboldt Park, scraping up mud and horse droppings off adjoining streets. Yet, from that lowly beginning, he grew to become “one of the greatest landscape architects of his time,” writes William H. Tishler in Jens Jensen: Nature’s Artist.

Indeed, even as Jensen was picking up after horse-drawn wagons, he was filled with hope and ambition:

“In the drawer of an old second-hand dresser (all we could afford) were plans I had drawn of famous gardens of the world. They represented a dream of something I still had to reach. Scraping mud and drawing plans!…I was on my way.”

Jensen soaked up the natural beauty of the landscapes in the city and throughout the hinterlands. And it’s possible today to see through his eyes what the areas outside Chicago once looked like before the arrival of housing developments, highways, malls and drive-thru McDonald’s restaurants:

“There were also the prairie flowers. I was fortunate enough to come early enough to see large stretches of plains west of Chicago land that had been held by wealthy people and not cultivated. I was fortunate enough to see hundreds of acres of phlox in bloom. You could almost see their reflection against the sky above.

“That again was an example of the power and greatness of the plains: this outburst of color by acres and acres of one kind of flower like the black-eyed susan, or down in Kansas, the sunflowers by the thousands and thousands of acres.”

 

Jensen the man

Tishler’s book, the second biography written about Jensen, includes many such rhapsodies by Jensen to native plants and the original landscape, elements that he wove into his designs.  A retired University of Wisconsin-Madison professor, Tishler has focused his book more on Jensen the man than Jensen the landscape architect.

The earlier biography, Jens Jensen: Maker of Natural Parks and Gardens, was published in 1992 by Robert E. Grese, a professor at the University of Michigan, Ann Arbor. Grese’s book is a thorough examination of Jensen’s career as a Chicago park official and in his private practice around the nation. In a 22-page appendix, cited by Tishler, Grese lists hundreds of Jensen’s private projects for wealthy homeowners, subdivisions, resorts, golf courses and parks across the nation.

Tishler emphasizes new information that he gathered about Jensen’s early years in Denmark, and he spends the final third of his book on the last sixteen years of Jensen’s life when he founded and led the Clearing Folk School, a continuing education institution near Ellison Bay, Wisconsin, in northern Door County.

In between, he gives a quick survey of Jensen’s work for a quarter of a century in the city’s West Park District, rising to general superintendent and chief landscape architect. This district was one of three in the city—the others being Lincoln Park and South Park—consolidated in 1934 into the Chicago Park District.

Present-day Chicagoans have much to thank Jensen for. He reshaped the landscapes of Humboldt Park, Garfield Park, Union Park and Douglas Park and designed Columbus Park, considered his masterpiece.

 

Resembling a haystack

The Garfield Park Conservatory, completed in 1907, was his brainchild, one of the largest in the world and a hugely popular addition to the parks. “To celebrate the character of the native prairie, he designed it to resemble a haystack,” reports Tishler.

Three times Jensen was fired from park jobs for his refusal to go along with political corruption and routinely hired back. He seems, in Tishler’s telling, almost larger than life:

Nearly six feet tall, he was trim and stood straight and had a ruddy complexion, bright blue eyes that sparkled when he talked and laughed, flowing white hair, heavy untrimmed eyebrows, and an old-fashioned mustache that curled up proudly at the ends. He also dressed dramatically with elegant tweed jackets and open-collar white shirts with a hanging scarf tied loosely at the top.

Indeed, one friend referred to him as “the giant Viking.”

 

“A friend from home”

And he certainly had a way with words. Extended quotations from Jensen are the high points of Tishler’s book.

For instance, at twenty-eight, Jensen was given the job of creating a garden at Union Park which he planned to fill with native wildflowers and call the American Garden. But he ran into a problem: No local nurseries had any plants native to the area.

“We couldn’t get the stock from nurserymen, as there had never been any requests for it, and we went out into the woods with a team and wagon and carted it in ourselves. Each plant was given room to grow as it wanted to. People enjoyed seeing the garden. They exclaimed excitedly when they saw flowers they recognized; they welcomed them as they would a friend from home.”

 

“Most poetic of all”

Another example are Jensen’s descriptions of the Indiana Dunes which, with many years of help from him and others, became a national park. At dawn “in dune country,” he wrote, the autumn landscape is aflood with the rose rays of the rising sun:

“Here were oaks partly clothed in red and brown, a flash of red in the top of the sumaches, blueberries, and blackberries in red and russet, touches of dogwood, gray aspen, red maple and shad, weird shapes of sour gum, and thousands of red tips of the swamp rose.

“But the most poetic of all—the foreground carpeted with delicate rose colored grasses now made more vivid by the brilliant light of dawn and amongst the grasses glistened millions of rosy diamonds, the first frost of the year.”

Over a long public and private career, Jens Jensen did much to shape the landscape that Chicagoans and others around the country call home.

And, even seventy-five years after his death, his words remind Chicagoans of the natural beauty this area once had and, with strong preservation efforts, can retain.

 

Patrick T. Reardon

9.23.26

 

This review was originally published by Third Coast Review on 9.28.26.