Focus — The Pros at Home
ILCA Visits Tim Johnson and by Nina Koziol
On a quiet tree-lined street in Highland
Park sits an iconic Midwestern four-square built in 1894. Poised on a 3/4-acre lot, the house and garden are set apart from others on the block by the selection of plants: pagoda dogwood, a columnar Regal Prince oak, a dawn redwood, hemlocks and viburnums as well as drifts of native perennials along the foundation. “He’s really good at picking more unusual shrubs,” Kristie Webber says of her husband, Tim Johnson. The couple married in 1991, and they both work at the Chicago Botanic Garden.
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Beginnings
Webber and Johnson have known each other since shortly after college. They met at Callaway Gardens in Pine Mountain, Georgia. When the Garden hired Johnson in 1985, the couple had been writing letters and talking by phone. Johnson sent Webber a job posting for a then-new position at Chicago Botanic Garden — Coordinator of Continuing Education. She also worked at Chicago’s Field Museum as division head of adult and family programs, before re-joining the Garden’s staff in 2001. She has served as the Garden’s
The Landscape Contractor June 2022
