Chicago Botanic Garden and Valor Glencoe
Trains, chipmunks and lettuce. We love this time of year! The air is crisp and chilly, the leaves are starting to turn, and you can get just about anything flavored with pumpkin-spice. Today started out a little rainy, but we decided to brave the weather and spend our Date Day at the Chicago Botanic Garden. We were not disappointed.
Model Railroad Garden
We enjoy seeing railway gardens and have been to the Gabis Arboretum in Valparaiso several times. As luck would have it though, we’ve never been to the Botanic Garden when their Model Railroad Garden was open. Today was our lucky day so we made this our first stop.
The Model Railroad Garden is almost two acres of train and garden fun. It features 18 different G-scale trains, each running on a separate track. The theme of the garden is American landmarks and we found almost 50 of them as we wandered amongst the garden’s 5,000 plants.
Each of the landmarks is handcrafted with natural materials, including twigs, bark, leaves, acorns and pebbles. Our favorites included several Frank Lloyd Wright buildings, a rendition of the Pike’s Place Market in Seattle and our very own South Shore train station. The garden even included working replicas of Mount St. Helens and Old Faithful.
We spent a fun 45 minutes trying to one up each other by pointing out tiny details in the landscape. Theresa found a miniature bear with a freshly-caught salmon in its mouth, a small outhouse by the circus and several tiny boats. Tom pretty much found nothing, but enjoyed watching the garden’s chipmunks dodging trains, as they scampered along the tracks.
Greenhouses and Bonsai Trees
It was starting to rain as we left the trains, so we headed over to the greenhouses to stay dry. The Garden has three greenhouses; tropical, semitropical and desert. Each features a vast array of plants indigenous to its climate. If you are lucky (we weren’t this time) you may get to visit when a corpse flower is in bloom. This once-every-few-years phenomenon makes the tropical greenhouse one of the smelliest places around for 24-hours.
Today, we spent most of our time in the Desert. We love the variety and funkiness of the various cacti and Tom always gets a kick out of pointing out the ones that look like body parts.
We spent enough time wandering like Moses and decided to check out the bonsai trees next. These miniature trees are incredible in their precision and perfection and some are almost 200 years old. Though small, they remind us of vast forest landscapes and we kept expecting to see little elves climbing in the branches.
Things You Eat
Our final stop was a tour of various edible plants around the Garden. We saw a lettuce wall, hanging baskets of peppers and parsley and more herbs and spices than you can imagine. We managed to snag a small bok choy plant to take home and discovered that a Curry Plant actually smells like curry. Who knew? It also made us hungry. We made a final stop at the Garden Shop, to buy a book to help us identify local birds, and headed off for lunch.
Valor Restaurant
We Yelped our way down Lake Cook Road until we stumbled across Valor. The reviews were very good so we decided to give it a try.
Valor is a New-American Bistro that prepares its dishes from scratch daily. When we arrived around 12:30 the restaurant was completely empty. This gave us a moment of pause, be we decided to stay and ended up having a wonderful meal.
Theresa had the Avocado Toast with a white French Bordeaux and Tom had a cheeseburger and a wheat beer. The toast came on homemade multigrain bread with marinated cherry tomatoes and a poached egg. Wow was it good! The cheeseburger, which came with tartar sauce, sheep’s milk cheddar cheese and onion marmalade, was equally good. The homemade chips and fries were also excellent.
Overall, the service was very efficient and friendly and the restaurant was very clean. As we ate, a few more couples came in so the place didn’t feel so empty. We would definitely come back.
September 2018
Chicago Botanic Garden
1000 Lake Cook Rd, Glencoe, IL 60022
$8 Admission for the Model Railroad Garden
$25 Parking for non-Cook Country residents
Valor Restaurant
667 Vernon Ave, Glencoe, IL 60022
$65 – Including drinks
1.5 Hours
Free Parking on the street
