Sunken Gardens, Garfield Park -- Indianapolis, IN

Sunken Gardens, Garfield Park – Indianapolis, IN

French Impressionist painter Claude Monet said, “I perhaps owe having become a painter to flowers.” And anyone who has ever seen any of Monet’s paintings knows that flowers are his pièce de résistance. In fact, flowers of all shapes, sizes, and colors fill his garden and home in France. Perhaps it’s true that beauty comes in the simplest forms.

This is what I thought about when I walked through the Sunken Gardens at Garfield Park on Indianapolis’ near south side. The gardens are open daily from 10am – 9pm through September 30. (Winter hours are 10am – 5pm.) It is located on the west side of the Garfield Conservatory and is free to the public.

The Sunken Gardens are nearing its centennial anniversary, marking its completion in 1916. It took two years for the planning and building of the gardens, with new greenhouses and the Conservatory becoming part of the park at the same time. Garfield Park, named after President James. A. Garfield, is Indianapolis’ oldest park which turns 137 years old this year. Not only is it beautiful to look at, it is “recognized as one of Indiana’s most significant works of landscape architecture” according to the pamphlet I picked up in the Conservatory.

Full of summer bloom, the place is alive with the colors of the season. I’m not a horticulturist or a gardener by any means. I can’t tell you the names of most flowers, or trees for that matter. My thumbs are definitely not green; more like brown, because that’s the color all my plants turn into. But I do respect their vast array of color, beauty, and simplicity, and I love to look at them from an artistic point of view. I love fresh cut lilacs or peonies in the spring. There’s nothing better than nature’s air freshener.

There’s something that happens when you walk through a garden like this. It takes you back to nature. For a moment, you escape the city, the noise, the busyness. Nineteenth-century England capitalized on this, often organizing trips to the country, made famous from such Romantic poets as Shelley, Keats, and Wordsworth. They believed it was good for the soul to reconnect with nature. And this reconnection with nature was one of the inspirations behind (American poet) Walt Whitman’s “Leaves of Grass” among other poets and poems. Artists alike, besides Monet, have been inspired by nature since the inception of recreating it, from Rembrandt and Van Gogh to Georgia O’Keefe and Ansel Adams.

In fact, when the University of Indianapolis was known as Indiana Central University, they used to have a mandatory day where you had to travel to Brown County State Park (about 45 miles south of Indianapolis) just to enjoy the scenery. I don’t know if they still do that or not. We try to instill the need to be able to get back to nature, but there are many kids who live in the city who do not travel outside of it. I think the Indy Parks people are doing a good job at adding and maintaining parks and green areas throughout the city, and the adjacent Conservatory does have programs aimed for all ages to teach about plants, flowers and gardening, as well as promoting a clean environment.

I found this to be a wonderful place to sit, eat lunch, grab your book and enjoy an hour in peace and quiet and take in the scenery.