Long before people talked about eco-anxiety or screen fatigue, one Chicago-area businessman found a simple answer: plant a museum’s worth of trees and let people walk through it. A 2025 study titled ‘Mapping arboretum research: Trends, gaps, and opportunities for biodiversity conservation, society, and climate resilience’ in Plants, People, Planet traced more than a century of published research on arboretums throughout the world and found that these tree-focused living collections have become important sites for conserving biodiversity, increasing climate resilience, and reconnection with nature.
That makes an appropriate context to revisit one of the most surprising time capsules of the Midwest: on December 14, 1922, businessman Joy Morton set aside 175 acres of land from his own private country estate at Lisle, Illinois, located west of Chicago, and made it open to the public as a place solely dedicated to trees. As Arboretum president Gerard T. Donnelly has said, trees add real value to people's well-being and make neighborhoods better places to live, and that has long been central to the Arboretum's mission.
