A Plant Man at a Growing Arboretum

There was no high berm to protect The Morton Arboretum from the roar and salt spray of Interstate Highway 88 when Kris Bachtell came to work here in 1981. The Visitor Center was a fraction of its current size, serving a quarter as many visitors each year as it does today. The Arboretum’s tree collections and research were known only to a few. Beautiful, resilient trees it introduced did not yet line streets across America.

Although the Arboretum had almost as many acres as it does today, “the staff was small, and the culture was more inward-focused and somewhat academic,” said Bachtell, now vice president of collections and horticulture. Like a number of the staff, he lived onsite, in a home dating from a time when the tree museum was out in the country, before subdivisions spread to surround it.

Now, as Bachtell looks forward to his retirement this fall, he takes satisfaction in an Arboretum that has grown and flourished.

Over 43 years, as he rose from a plant propagator position to his current leadership role, the Arboretum has opened up to the world. It has built a joyful Children’s Garden that immerses children in nature and visitor facilities that invite more than a million guests each year. Its tree and biodiversity research program is now more widely known in the scientific world, and it has become a global leader in tree conservation.

Several of its tree collections have been recognized for their excellence. Beautiful, resilient elms, maples, and other plants developed at the Arboretum are planted across the nation and the world. Its outreach and education programs reach tens of thousands of people a year and bring trees and better tree care to hundreds of communities. Bachtell has played a leading role in making all of this happen.

He gives much of the credit for the Arboretum’s flowering to former president and CEO Gerard T. Donnelly, who led the institution from 1990 to 2022. “Gerry Donnelly changed the Arboretum in a fundamental way,” he said. Donnelly brought long-term strategy and planning to the institution, honed its focus on trees, and made visitation a priority. His successor, Jill Koski, is leading the Arboretum to exponentially expand its impact and vision of a greener, healthier, more beautiful world where people and trees thrive together. In her earlier tenure with the organization as Vice President of Development, Koski was instrumental in developing philanthropic giving to expand the institution’s capabilities and ambitions beyond what the Morton family’s endowment could support. Bachtell, as a passionate plant expert and a storyteller, has helped develop relationships with donors.

Donnelly had recognized Bachtell’s abilities, promoting him to oversee not only the Arboretum’s plants, but its grounds and facilities. Soon, broader plans were developed for the collections.

In the mid-1980s, a hilly berm had arisen to buffer the Arboretum from the tollway, made of soil excavated from many building projects. “That berm was built from the development of DuPage County,” he said. Bachtell helped design the plantings that cover it today.

At the turn of the century, Bachtell oversaw the construction of the Visitor Center, the Children’s Garden, and the Maze Garden, financed partially by the Branching Out! fundraising campaign. Later, with support from donors to the Growing Brilliantly campaign, he led the construction of maintenance and office facilities to support the care of the trees and plants. The extensive new growing facilities dwarfed the greenhouses next to the Research Building that had been brand-new when he first worked there as the plant propagator.

Meanwhile, Bachtell remained first and foremost a plantsman. He worked closely with George Ware, who pioneered work to develop new kinds of elms that could resist the deadly Dutch elm disease. With a background in the commercial horticulture industry, Bachtell worked with partners to set up the Chicagoland Grows® Plant Introduction Program, which markets Arboretum plants. Today, some 20,000 Accolade® elms are sold each year, propagated from a tree selected by Ware from the Arboretum’s collections.

It was Ware who first took Bachtell on a collecting trip to China in 1990, searching for resistant elms and other species in the wild. In the decades since, he has returned to China nine times and collected plants in many other locations. More than 600 plants from those trips are now growing in the collections.

In his work to build the Arboretum, Bachtell has faced many challenges, from epic floods to a shortage of trained horticultural workers who lack the same kind of academic training he had at the start of his career. “Now we hire good people and train them in the skills they need,” he said.

Today’s great challenge is climate change. He has already overseen a plan for making the collections more resilient in the face of increasing drought, heat, flooding, and storms.

For Kris Bachtell, it always comes back to plants. After he retires at the end of September, he plans to keep writing and teaching about them, as he has for years. A search is underway for his successor as a new nurturer and guardian of the Arboretum’s trees and plants.

“The thing I’ve loved about the Arboretum all my career is that you can learn something new about plants every day,” Bachtell said. “You can always step out of the office into this beautiful landscape and learn something.”

To make a special gift in honor of Kris Bachtell or to support the Arboretum’s tree collections and its broader mission, please contact the Donor Relations team at donorrelations@mortonarb.org or call 630-725-2177.