Garden
The Morton Arboretum
4100 IL-53, Lisle, IL 60532, USA
Sprawling tree museum of woodland trails, prairie, and a grafted lineage of the region's oldest oaks.
This guide to The Morton Arboretum outside Chicago follows a beloved bur oak at Lincoln Park Zoo that visitors believed had witnessed the Civil War and the Chicago Fire, and what the Arboretum's own scientists found when they examined its rings. It traces the tree's decline by 2023 and the notes visitors left it before it came down, describing the goodbye as like sitting with someone in hospice. The Arboretum's founder built the whole institution around a two-word family motto.
Audio guides are written and narrated by AI.