Constable: Garden show's director has roots in Wheeling
Like a weed, we must first deal with this cliché: the roots of the Chicago Flower & Garden Show owner and director.
“As a child, I asked my parents if I could grow a vegetable garden in our backyard,” remembers Tony Abruscato, who was allowed to dig up the grass behind the family home in Wheeling. “I still remember what that lettuce tasted like.”
This week Abruscato's passion for gardens will be on display at Chicago's Navy Pier as he will be trying to grow “the next generation of gardeners” through the 2018 Chicago Flower & Garden Show. The show kicks off Tuesday night with the annual “Evening in Bloom” charity preview and is open to the public from 10 a.m. to 8 p.m. Wednesday through Sunday.
“The roots of the show date back to 1847,” Abruscato says, noting that the original fruit and flower exposition has evolved during the years and even missed some years entirely. “There were some little stops for the Great Chicago Fire, the Civil War, things like that.”
The show has been trimmed from nine days to five but features more plants, more gardens and more classes than ever, Abruscato says. The event costs more than $1 million to stage, employs dozens of workers from five unions, and features 1,300 tons of sand and tens of thousands of plants in the 170,000-square-foot hall.
“We have 22 different gardens and each garden is built by an individual garden company, a lot of them from the suburbs,” Abruscato says. “It's not your grandma's prize rose on a table. It's life-size gardens you can walk through, with koi ponds, waterfalls, outdoor kitchens, vegetable gardens and, this year, the Mad Hatter and Queen of Hearts.”
The literary characters grew out of a partnership with Bernie's Book Bank, a Lake Bluff-based charity and leading provider of quality books to at-risk children in the Chicago area, and creators of the garden that welcomes people to the 2018 show.
“Every garden has a story,” Abruscato says. The garden at his home on the border of Michigan and Indiana is built around a tree that he planted with his dad, Mario, an arborist who died five years ago. Abruscato's city balcony garden boasts tomatoes, basil, rosemary and mint, which tells guests that he enjoys Caprese salad, rosemary potatoes and mojitos.
The Chicago Flower & Garden show, which Abruscato has directed since 2012, has become more about gardens than flowers.
“We're kind of a green idea show,” Abruscato says. “We want to inspire, educate and motivate.”
In 2013, Abruscato was named chairman of Chicago Gateway Green, a nonprofit that installs gardens and art along the expressways. Last year, he launched the nonprofit Get Growing Foundation, which aims to educate children and teens about plants and gardens.
Abruscato, who turns 54 today, always has been driven. At 18, he successfully campaigned for a spot on the Wheeling park board, celebrating his 19th birthday just before he was elected, becoming the youngest officeholder in the state. His mother, Judy, who still lives in the house where her son once planted his vegetable garden, served 22 years as a village trustee before her election in 2009 as mayor, a post she held until 2013.
Working with his arborist father gave Abruscato a good appreciation for nature, and “a lot of raking,” he says. Many of the flowers on display at Navy Pier, such as tulips and roses, are primed in greenhouses to bloom for the week of the show, “not the week before the show and definitely not the week after,” Abruscato says. In addition to nine free programs a day for kids who buy a $5 ticket, all the gardens are meant to stimulate gardeners' imaginations, he says.
“You can walk though a garden, sit on a bench next to a koi pond and think, ‘Oh, this is what it could be like in my backyard,'” Abruscato says. Of course, that all changes if your kid dug up the backyard to grow vegetables.
Constable: Gardener was once youngest officeholder in Illinois