UW-Madison Arboretum

This land, like all of the Madison area, is part of the ancestral home of the Ho-Chunk, whose villages, effigy mounds, and long presence around the four lakes reach back thousands of years. Several ancient mounds survive within the Arboretum, quiet reminders of that deep history on the ground.

When the University set the Arboretum aside during the Great Depression, the land was worn-out farm fields and pasture. Rather than simply let it grow wild, the founders chose a bolder path: to restore the native ecosystems that had once covered this country before the plow. In 1934 workers began planting Curtis Prairie, seeding and transplanting native grasses and flowers onto bare ground, and in doing so they launched the entire discipline of restoration ecology. It was here that people first proved a lost prairie could be brought back.

Aldo Leopold, one of the Arboretum's guiding figures and a professor at the University, helped shape its early work and its philosophy. His idea of a land ethic, that people are members of a community that includes the soil, water, plants, and animals, and owe that community care rather than mere use, runs through everything the Arboretum stands for.

The restored prairies and woods here are that ethic made real. They embody the belief that humans can be healers of land as well as its users, and generations of students and scientists have carried the lessons learned on these fields out into the wider world of conservation. To walk the Arboretum is to walk through the practical proof of an idea that reshaped how America thinks about nature.

The Arboretum packs a surprising range of habitats into its green belt. Curtis and Greene prairies wave with tallgrass in late summer, oak savannas open into scattered old trees and sun-loving flowers, and mature woods carpet the ground with spring ephemerals before the leaves close overhead. Along Lake Wingra, marshes and wet meadows draw a different set of birds and plants.

That variety makes for rich wildlife watching in the middle of a city. Deer, turkeys, foxes, and countless birds move through the preserve, sandhill cranes stalk the wetlands, and the prairies hum with insects and grassland songbirds in summer. Miles of trails thread all of it, so a short walk can carry you from open prairie into deep woods to the edge of a marsh.

Spring is beloved for the wave of woodland wildflowers that blooms before the trees leaf out, and for the return of migrating birds to the marshes. Summer brings the prairies into their full height and flower, a slow crescendo that peaks in late summer when the tallgrass towers overhead and the blooms are at their richest.

Autumn turns the woods gold and the prairies bronze, and the seed-heavy grasses draw sparrows and finches. Winter opens the landscape to snowshoe and quiet walking, and prescribed burns in the dormant season, part of keeping the prairies healthy, are a striking reminder of the constant work behind this restored land.

The closest Boutel™ stays, so you can turn this stop into an overnight. Each is an independently owned, editorially selected place to stay.