John Seaton and the Garden of Eden
On a sunny, crystalline Saturday morning in early spring, I sat down on a bench within the lovely surroundings of the Oak Park Conservatory with John Seaton to talk about his retirement as the Manager of Conservatory Operations for the Oak Park Conservatory. John’s official retirement date was June 6, 2008. An articulate and charming man, John and I discussed his background, his proudest accomplishments, and his challenges as the manager of the Conservatory for the past 24 years. Please read on to get to know this remarkable man, long-time OPALGA member, and stalwart resident of south Oak Park.
A native of Wales, John was born and raised in Colwyn Bay, and after the age of two, his family moved to Hampshire, Somerset, and then to Devonshire in the south of England, where John’s father was a dairy farmer. John attended Dartington Hall School in Devonshire, a progressive, coeducational boarding school similar to Summerhill, which many of you may be familiar with if you have read the famous book Summerhill by A. S. Neill.
“I enjoyed the school very much. I met very interesting people, and it gave me lots of expensive ideas and hobbies, but no real way of satiating them,” John said.
John continued, “By the age of 17, it was decided that academia was not for me.” He left school and began to work as an unpaid apprentice at the Dartington Hall garden. After a year, he was officially accepted into their apprenticeship program. He lived in the garden in a hostel for young gardeners, called a “bothey,” where, John said, “we lived there and ate and slept horticulture. We had lectures one evening a week, and, occasionally, we would go off to look at other gardens.”
After two years, John was certified and then was accepted at the Lacham School of Agriculture as an assistant gardener to the college. John worked there with a lot of the agricultural students on keeping the grounds going and was there for several years. From there, it was on to Cannington in Somerset to study horticulture. John’s next stop was a training program at the Royal Horticultural Society Garden at Wisley, in Surrey. He then worked as an instructor and gardener for the Gloucestershire Farm Institute, and later moved on to running the research greenhouses at the Royal Botanic Gardens, Kew.
In 1972, John was hired by the University of Wisconsin, Madison, as an academic specialist, running the botany greenhouses and garden. In 1984, John took the position at the Conservatory. He said, “It was really sort of coming back to my roots because I had studied municipal horticulture rather than botany.”
The Conservatory began as a community effort in 1914 to provide a place to house exotic plants that area residents collected during their travels abroad. The present Edwardian-style glass structure, built in 1929, houses a botanical collection of more than 3,000 plants.
Over the years, the building fell into disrepair. In 1970, when plans were made to raze it, a group of concerned citizens led a successful drive to preserve, and eventually enhance, this unique resource. After this successful fundraising effort, the Friends of the Oak Park Conservatory was officially formed in 1986 to work with the Park District of Oak Park to help promote community interest, offer educational opportunities, and support projects that benefit the Conservatory and its visitors. In 2000, the Conservatory Center was opened to provide expanded space and facilities for educational programming, day-to-day operations, and public events. “The Conservatory was saved by the community, for the community,” said John, “and I’ve always felt like this position is in trust to the community.”
The Conservatory draws up to 30,000 visitors annually. In 2004, the Conservatory was named an Oak Park Landmark, and in 2005, it was named to the National Register of Historic Places by the U.S. Department of the Interior.
One of the challenges of running the Conservatory has been to get and keep the word out, and John said that the Friends of the Conservatory have been tremendously helpful in that area. Funding is also always a challenge. John said that there are a lot of demands on limited resources, and he has been very frugal with his budget.
Part of John’s job has been to oversee the astounding number of bedding plants that are planted at public parks and sites throughout the village of Oak Park. When John arrived in Oak Park, Scoville Park had just been redesigned, and John was the first person to plant material in the beds surrounding the war memorial in the park. In later years, when OPALGA started its “Building Bridges” festival in the park, John tried to provide plant material that related to that festival. John joined OPALGA in the year of its founding (1989) and said that he would like to have been more involved throughout the years but that he wasn’t because of his total involvement with the Conservatory.
“One of the things about my job that I have enjoyed the most,” said John, “is how the community has taken to the conservatory. They come in and just sigh with relief, especially during a winter like our last one, which seemed to go on forever.” He continued, “This is a place where children often take their first faltering steps. Our displays in the parks, our plant clinics, our presence at the Farmers’ Market—all of this has led to a lot of good will generated by what the Conservatory does in the community.”
John said that his proudest accomplishments at the Conservatory have been getting the Friends of the Conservatory organized, getting the Conservatory Center built, and obtaining both the local and national historic recognition. When I asked what the best-kept secret about the Conservatory is, John said, “I call it the Garden of Eden at the corner of East and Garfield. It’s right here. You don’t have to go to Florida. Coming to the Conservatory is an aesthetic experience. You can just come here and enjoy a sense of green and growing.”
In the first phase of his retirement, John is going to spend some time in England visiting his granddaughter, and he is proud to say that he is expecting another grandchild!
The theme of “community” came up again and again in our conversation, and John is both grateful for and satisfied with his time in the village of Oak Park. “One needs to be who one is in the world, and I’ve been lucky to be who I am,” he said. We will continue to see John out and about in the village, stopping to smell the roses.
