Jens Jensen

Dean of Prairie Style Landscape Design

Jens Jensen was born in Denmark in 1860 and immigrated to America in 1884. He worked as a day laborer in Florida for a short time and then moved to Decorah, Iowa, where he is credited with developing the campus plan for Luther College. While in Iowa he fell in love with the Midwest landscape, a landscape that would influence his work for the rest of his life.

A job as a gardener for the West Chicago Park District took Jens Jensen to Chicago. When a garden area planted with exotic flowers (as was the custom of the time) withered and died, Jensen traveled to the surrounding prairie and gathered native wildflowers. He transplanted these wildflowers into a garden space in Union Park establishing what became known as the American Garden. 

An early environmental activist, Jensen founded the Friends of Our Native Landscape and was a driving force in establishing the Cook County Forest Preserve District and the Illinois State Park system. In 1920, Jensen left the  park district to establish his own design firm in Ravinia, Illinois. His client list was impressive, including Henry and Edsel Ford, Frederick Pabst, the Armour and Florsheim families, as well as many other American industrialists.

Jens Jensen valued the sunrise and sunsets and often incorporated a clearing in his landscape just for the purpose of viewing them. Included in many of his designs, the council ring, a low circular wall of grouping of stones evoking both his native Viking past and Native American egalitarianism. A group sitting on these stones gathers in a continuous circle without hierarchy, but a simple affirmation all members of the community are important. Just as each element of a landscape design has its own very important role to play.

Jensen retired in 1935 at the age of 75.  Jens Jensen passed away at his home, The Clearing, in 1951, at the age of 91.

Jens Jensen: The Living Green

JENS JENSEN LANDSCAPE SCHEMATICS