The lines extend with the occasional loop, embellishments that almost seem to bend and sway. The floating dot of an i sits next to a t whose cross arcs before it’s flicked to the next letter. Each capital I is a stately series of flourishes, while every m is a hurried afterthought that looks more like three straight lines than a series of mounds.

“Most of these plants you’ll have to collect from the prairies or the woods,” the note reads, followed by a list of towns where they could be found, including Libertyville and Naperville. The handwriting appears rushed, but elongated, as if there’s no patience for precision but room to let the words stretch. If the sentences ebb and flow across the page like a gentle breeze, then the writer’s signature at the end is a sharp gust: constricting letters, tall and narrow, that fall and crash against each other as a kind of punctuation. As if to make its implicit instruction an exclamation: Go to the prairie! Signed, Jens Jensen. 

Phil Ponce also can’t make out much of the famous Chicago landscape architect’s handwriting. We’re sitting in his living room, with his wife, Ann, seated across from us in a high-back chair, a fire crackling in the fireplace. It’s a chilly early-May afternoon, and we’re trying to decipher the bit that comes after “Naperville.” Ponce laughs, flashing a smile recognizable from his long tenure as the host of WTTW’s Chicago Tonight. 

Ponce is showing me a reproduction of a Jensen landscape sketch and instructions. There’s a list of plants (“A mixture of ironwood, black cherry, chokecherry, plum, crabapple, grey dogwood, sheep berry,” reads one note) and rapidly drawn swirls meant to represent trees and shrubs. What seems to be a path swoops up the middle of the page to a rectangle that Jensen has surrounded with lilacs and crabapple and plum trees. This part is easy to decipher: a driveway leading up to a house. The house that we’re currently sitting in. 

In 2023, the Ponces, casually considering a downsize and a move from Ravenswood to be closer to their adult children in the north suburbs, were scrolling through Zillow listings with friends over Easter brunch. “This one looks interesting,” somebody said, holding up his phone to show a small but charming white cottage in Northbrook, long and narrow, with large windows. The guests hadn’t even left yet when Phil made an appointment to see the house the next day.

“I was furious. Furious!” Ann tells me. She shoots Phil a teasing glance. “Like, can’t you just give me a few days to catch my breath after hosting all these people?” She was still mad when they got to the house with their real estate agent, who was a friend. When she looked around, she told the agent, “You should buy this house.” But now, as a cardinal alights on the grass just outside the window behind her, Ann concedes: “What I was really saying was I should buy this house.” 

Both Phil and Ann fell in love with it before knowing that the original owners were photographer Helen Balfour Morrison and her husband, Robert. They found that out after learning the house was being sold by the Morrison-Shearer Foundation, started by Morrison and her close artistic collaborator of over 40 years, dancer Sybil Shearer. The foundation had entertained a variety of offers from local developers, folks interested in splitting up the three-acre property or tearing down the house to make room for something more in line with the newer builds popping up around the neighborhood. The Ponces wrote a letter. Ann, herself a painter, promised to keep the creative spirit of the house alive, that it “would continue its history as a place where the visual arts are honored.”

It was enough to convince the foundation’s board, and soon the Ponces were closing on the house. They had negotiated to keep Helen’s books and some of the original furniture, but what they hadn’t expected, as they signed the paperwork, was for an original Jensen sketch of landscape plans for the property to be placed in their hands. Dated 1940, it was drawn the same year the house was completed. 

“I was beside myself,” Phil says. “Oh my gosh, this little gem has landed in my hands. How do I take care of this baby so that it comes to life?” 

What the Ponces learned, as they held the sketch and marveled at what they’d just inherited, was that Jensen’s plan had never been implemented. But calling it a plan, or even a vision, feels like an overstatement. And that’s part of the charm. There’s no scale, no scientific names for the plants, but instead circles around the perimeter, suggesting where gray dogwood and sumac and hazel trees should be planted, and smaller circles dotting the property, representing hawthorn and elm trees. There are ink spots, erased pencil. The word “prairie,” in Jensen’s elongated script, is crossed out in the middle, as if it had been misspelled and an attempt was made to correct it. 

I’ve asked the Ponces and a handful of Jensen experts what to make of it. There’s a collective agreement that this was not a formal plan but more of a suggestion, if anything. “My impression is that pretty frequently, Jensen would offer advice. Particularly when he was living in Highland Park,” says Bob Grese, a professor emeritus of environment and sustainability at the University of Michigan who has written extensively about Jensen. Grese says there are lots of stories about Jensen walking around and advising people on their landscapes. “One person shared that when they were children, they woke up to their parents frantically digging up these plants in the front yard that they had just planted. And it was because this man named Jensen had come by and told them that they made a serious mistake.” 

As the superintendent of Chicago’s West Park System, Jensen had made a reputation for himself, designing iconic spaces like the Garfield Park Conservatory, Humboldt Park, and Columbus Park using native Illinois plants, which other landscape designers dismissed as weeds. Born in Denmark, Jensen immigrated to the United States in 1883, arriving in Chicago by way of Florida and Iowa. He was particularly drawn to the plants he discovered in the Midwest — the poetry of the deciduous forest and the friendliness of the plains . At a time when most landscapes were filled with exotic plants that struggled in the Chicago climate and required considerable maintenance, Jensen looked instead to plants, like purple phlox and fiery goldenrod, that thrived here. “To me,” he wrote in his 1939 memoir, Siftings, “no plant is more refined than that which belongs.” 

In his plan for the Morrisons, he dots the landscape with native shrubs and trees. A hawthorn (which he calls “always illuminating” in Siftings) is placed at the curve of the driveway. A crabapple (“its lavender touch reflected on massive snow fields, turning into a delicate blue in the light of the day’s afterglow”) stands at the southeastern end of the house. There’s witch hazel (“like a golden mist driving through our woodlands”) behind the house, and phlox (which “make a garden full of song”) in front. This sketch, though casual, reads more like poetry than an offhand suggestion. There’s also a friendly familiarity in the precision of the driveway’s arch, the approximation of the size of the house — one that comes from knowing it well, through lingering conversations across from a crackling fire, like the one I’m having with the Ponces. As we talk, Ann brings over one of Morrison’s books from the bookshelf, a first edition of Siftings. Inside is an  inscription: “To my friend Helen Morrison who has vision and a real interest in her fellow man. Jens Jensen.” 

Morrison and Jensen met in 1934. It was then that a 33-year-old Morrison, recovering from a series of illnesses, was invited by a friend, painter Carol-Lou Burnham, to attend a lecture by Jensen. Though she’d never considered herself an artist, Morrison had opened a photography studio with her brother in Evanston after their mother’s death. But her health had made it difficult to run the business, so she’d turned it over to him in pursuit of a quieter life with her husband.

Hearing Jensen speak, Morrison was rapt. “When he said, ‘This morning as I stood in my woods and looked out over the great Green Bay, I felt I could lay down my hat and meet my Maker,’ suddenly I knew there was a Maker after years of denying it,” she would years later tell Shearer, who recounted the conversation in an essay about Morrison. As everyone filed out after the lecture, she remained seated in the empty room until Burnham quietly asked if they should go.

When Morrison returned home, she decided that she would “take pictures until I felt good enough to photograph Jensen.” In 1935, she did just that, creating the well-known portrait that now hangs in the Garfield Park Conservatory. In it, Jensen, chin in hand, leans toward the viewer. There is the suggestion of a smile underneath his white mustache, his eyes creased and kind. But perhaps most striking is the light. Light that, Shearer noted, “seemed to shine around and through him.”

By 1941, Morrison and her husband had moved to the charming rectangular white house in Northbrook that they had commissioned architect Robert Seyfarth to design. Back then, the land was wild, closer to nature than what they had at their previous home in Winnetka. Morrison set up her darkroom in the basement and continued to make portraits for what had become her Great Americans series, photographing individuals like Ludwig Mies van der Rohe, Bertrand Russell, and Julia Thecla. Her Northbrook home also became a destination for artists, such as composers John Cage and Louis Horst and dancer Ruth St. Denis, who would stop by for tea when they were in town. 

Jensen and Morrison found “kindred spirits in each other,” Grese says: “Helen was photographing many famous Chicagoans, and Jensen moved in the same circle with some of those influential Chicagoans at the same time, so they hit it off. I guess it would be natural, then, that she would ask Jensen to sketch out a plan for their landscape.” 

Apparently there’s a film of Jensen on the property. I’m desperate to find it but have only run into dead ends. As Grese describes it to me, Jensen is waving his hands, showing the Morrisons where things would be planted. I want to see how Jensen holds himself as he walks — to see someone who knows his craft so well offer casual direction. To see what he’s like among friends. Grese tells me that Jensen’s approach to landscape, specifically residential landscape, was to use design to build a relationship between the owner and the natural environment. Yes, he considered it art, but it was also something that moved and breathed with the people who engaged the space. 

In some ways, it doesn’t matter that Jensen’s plan was never realized while the Morrisons were living. Ann Ponce thinks it may have been an issue with money, with not wanting to spend what it would cost. Even as the invasive buckthorn grew into thick hedges that would eventually engulf the property, there was an appreciation for the privacy it gave. In 1952, Shearer built herself a small apartment with a studio on the property. Morrison filmed her dancing outside, light dappling through the trees as she moved with purpose and clarity and allowed the landscape act as a conduit for her movement. Let the world in front of you inspire what you can create, she conveys on the grainy, light-filled film. A very Jensen idea, indeed. 

As the Ponces found themselves holding an original Jensen landscape plan for the property that they had just bought, they realized it was something special, extraordinary even, that they would need to follow up on. Yet they didn’t know where to begin. At the suggestion of Geoffrey Baer, a former WTTW colleague of Phil’s, they called Julia Bachrach, a historian who’d worked for the Chicago Park District. They told her they needed someone who understood Jensen’s vision and would be a steward of it. She connected them with Chris Gent, a landscape architect who had previously worked for the park district and had experience with restoring historical landscapes. He would later tap Roy Diblik, a Wisconsin-based plantsman and designer widely respected for his knowledge of native perennials to advise on and oversee the plantings. As it had in 1941, the Northbrook house was once again drawing together a community of artists and visionaries, this time to fulfill one of its earliest collaborations. 

On a balmy spring day in 2024, Gent picked up Bachrach, and the two made their way to the Ponces’. They were joined by Grese, who had just moved to Wheaton, and Carol Doty, the former director of the Morrison-Shearer Foundation and a close friend of Shearer’s. By now, the buckthorn had taken over. There was a general agreement that it would have to be removed in order to provide the blank slate needed to bring Jensen’s sketch to life. 

Doty, now 92, was the only one who hesitated, but she ultimately understood. “Sybil liked the buckthorn because it sheltered her and gave her privacy,” she told me when we spoke in May over cookies and ice water on the back porch of her Downers Grove home. “She knew it was a weed, but she was glad it was there to keep the road traffic from looking in.” Doty recalled spending time with Shearer in Northbrook back in the ’90s. She remembered a large oak tree that no longer exists, as well as the solitude provided by the buckthorn. It struck me how personal it felt. How the landscape is so often an extension of ourselves. Even weeds become treasured if they establish themselves well. 

This is the inherent beauty of the landscape. There’s none of the rigidity of buildings and structures. It’s meant to breathe. “I think Jensen saw his landscapes as being dynamic over time and changing,” Grese says. “At the time that Jensen would have been working on this for the Morrisons, he was working on the Lincoln Memorial Garden [in Springfield], where he was planting acorns, something that wasn’t going to happen for 50 years. Thinking long term is clearly something that he had in mind on a number of projects.” 

And then there’s what another noted Chicago landscape architect, Alfred Caldwell, once observed: that making landscapes is like making snow angels early in the morning only to have them melt away by the afternoon. In other words, landscapes require considerable patience — both with nature’s time frame and its proclivity to ignore the way we want things to unfold — and they find ways, big and small, to remind us of their ephemerality. And herein lies the challenge: Could Jensen’s original plan — conceived 85 years ago for different people with different needs and for a place (and a climate) that has changed significantly — be resurrected?

The Ponces decided to give it their best shot. But first the buckthorn had to go. All of it. 

It was colder than I’d anticipated as I wound my way through the neighborhood where the Ponces live. When its stately homes were built, they were on the fringes of wilderness, but there’s no sense of prairie here now. Lawns are impeccably manicured, and while I’m not a botanist, I didn’t spot many native plants. In fact, I paid so much attention to the landscaping of neighbors that I nearly drove past the Ponces’ home. With the buckthorn gone, the house, in its starkness, held itself differently. I noticed netting around newly dug beds, fresh saplings holding steady. I thought of something Jensen wrote: “The landscaper must be imbued with an imaginative mind.”

An hour later, after we chat inside, surrounded by Morrison’s beautiful things and Ann’s paintings, I’m walking the property with Phil. He’s pointing to the various areas, talking about what’s been planted, most of it by Rossi Landscapes, a Highland Park firm. A few of the trees have died since they were installed last summer, but that’s to be expected, he tells me. They’ll be replaced, but it’s yet another reminder that taking on a project like this requires a little bit of luck and a lot of tenacity. 

Gent’s first order of business, when he signed on, was to translate Jensen’s sketch into a more formal plan, turning his suggestions into decisions on where, exactly, to place the mix of coneflowers, prairie violets, phlox, and blazing stars. The sketch was incomplete, accounting for only the front of the property, so Gent would need to extrapolate Jensen’s ideas for the much bigger back part. 

Adhering to Jensen’s philosophy of creating a relationship between the owners and their landscape, Gent didn’t try to replicate the plan exactly as it was designed for the Morrisons, but instead went to the Ponces to better understand their needs. For one thing, they didn’t want a big lawn — just enough space for the grandkids to run around and play catch — so Gent tried to interpret their request the way Jensen might. “Maybe it would be more ecologically smart to build on what Jensen called a meadow — which was really a lawn — and build an actual prairie,” Gent says. Gent’s not a prairie expert himself, so he called in Jensen’s great-grandson, also named Jens Jensen, an authority on ecological restoration, to advise on the seed mixture. Alluvium Landscapes, a design firm based in Barrington, will come in the fall for seeding and planting. 

Then the Ponces will wait. In five to 10 years, once everything is finally in place, each seed and plant planted, the structure of the plan will start to breathe. You’ll begin to see the prairie, Gent tells me. The shrubs will take off, the trees will take root. And then, as landscapes are wont to do, this one will continue to grow and evolve on its own timeline. 

“Jensen’s designs, they are works of art,” Bachrach tells me. “Instead of paint on canvas, which has its own restoration challenges, there are all these things you can’t control like you could in someplace like the Art Institute.” 

We’d been talking not only about the Ponces’ property but also other Jensen landscapes in Chicago, including Columbus Park, which features his trademark flint stone council ring. Unlike drawings or paintings, these historical spaces cannot be placed in storage for preservation. What makes them beautiful is the same thing that makes it easy to take them for granted: They are living pieces of art that lull you quietly, unassumingly, into the tranquility of the outdoors. 

“The landscaper must see the tree in its full beauty hundreds of years hence,” Jensen writes in Siftings. The page is dog-eared in my well-worn used copy. Like Jensen’s sketch, the book’s imperfections — a bent cover, a nearly broken spine — make it feel all the more familiar. And that makes the plants that Jensen writes about feel familiar, too. I find myself delighting in a grove of sumac along a tidy trail in Lake Forest, relishing a shock of purple phlox. I realize I’ve never seen an Illinois prairie when I ask Gent if he shares Jensen’s appreciation of this particular type of landscape. “I think it’s sublime,” he says after a beat. The tenor of his voice shifts, and I can tell he’s picturing the prairie as we talk. “It’s beautiful in its large scale, but then you focus on the details. The flowers, the different textures you have out there. It’s just, to me …” He pauses in reflection. “It’s very peaceful.”

This is Jensen, I think. This seeing and noticing and knowing, with a kind of reverence, the world around you. It reminds me of what Phil told me when I asked him what he thinks it will be like to live amid Jensen’s landscape. We were nearing the end of our conversation inside the house, getting ready to walk the grounds. He leaned back in his chair. “I’ll be living in Jens Jensen’s head. Living in a kind of Jens Jensen dream.” He smiled, as if he’d been waiting for this question. “I feel like his spirit will be surrounding us, and I’m looking forward to knowing what that feels like.” 

Down the hallway, behind Phil’s head, I can see the dining room. There’s a simple rectangular table with five ladder-back chairs that belonged to Morrison. Out of a green vase that’s been placed in the middle, a cascade of pale yellow tulips and green hydrangeas. Jensen sits at the table of his old friend, perhaps with furrowed brow and pursed lips, his pen gliding over the paper in front of him. Go to the prairie!