Artist finds his wildflowers are growing on Chicago

NO artist could ask for a better canvas. And Chapman Kelley, a bearded, well-tanned Texan, is happy to be painting what he considers his most important work right on the landscape of one of Chicago's loveliest downtown parks.

Never mind that Chicagoans haven't decided quite what it is -- a wildflower painting, as the artist contends, or simply a beautiful garden. ``From the roof of my building it looks like a giant needlepoint,'' says neighbor Willard Nyburg.

Whatever it is, ``Chicago Wildflower Works I'' (its official title) is fast becoming a major tourist attraction and luring hundreds of curious strollers and volunteer helpers from neighboring office and apartment skyscrapers.

Mr. Kelley has long had a special fondness for the natural beauty of wildflowers, which have been the subject of many of his paintings for the last 20 years.

``To me they're very lyrical,'' he says. ``Everything about them historically and symbolically is absolutely positive.''

With the cooperation of the Chicago Park District, the artist has taken his favorite subject off the canvas and orchestrated the planting of hundreds of thousands of colorful wildflowers on the grassy roof of an underground parking garage in Chicago's Grant Park.

The design is in the form of two ellipses, each the size of a football field. Ringed by a 10-foot border of white blossoms, each contains 48 varieties of native wildflowers, blooming from spring to fall in programmed sequence.

Lovely as it is, this is not strictly art for art's sake. Yes, Kelley is trying to make an artistic statement to a broader-than-usual audience. ``Art-ists want their work to sing to everybody,'' he concedes.

But as he explained it recently, sitting in white shirt and white shorts near the ``painting'' he regularly tends, weeds, and interprets to passers-by, the project also has a significant educational mission.

``This whole wildflower thing has become very glamorous, but there's been a lot more talk than action,'' says Kelley, who hopes to educate people to the popular but little-researched area of wildflower study. He also hopes his project will go some distance toward building solid public support for wider use of wildflowers in landscaping.

Growing wildflowers as art is not new to Kelley. During the last nine years, he has sown their seeds along a four-mile stretch between toll booths at the Dallas/Fort Worth Airport, in a park by the Dallas Museum of Natural History, and around the yard of his own art gallery in that city.

Kelley says that if nothing else, he's proved it can be done.

``In the beginning everybody told me this was a great idea, but that you can't grow wildflowers and you certainly can't transplant them -- I couldn't buy that.''

He also became convinced that ``nature's flowers,'' as he calls them, have strong economic and environmental advantages over grass as landscaping material. Their root systems are better at preventing soil erosion, he says. And they need less fertilizer, water, and mowing.

A number of state highway departments, well aware of those advantages, now mow around existing fields of wildflowers.

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