What is the cultural significance of the EcoLab?
“Our native landscape is our home, the little world we live in, where we are born and where we play, where we grow up and finally where we are…laid to eternal rest. It speaks of the distant past and carries our life into the tomorrow. To keep this pure and unadulterated is a sacred heritage, a noble task of the highest cultural value.”
– Jens Jensen to Camillo Schneider, April 15, 1939
- In the early 1900s the property was part of the Riverdale estate, a country estate built by James Allison, an Indianapolis entrepreneur and one of the founders of the Indianapolis 500.
- The grounds were designed by master landscape architect, Jens Jensen, known as the “Prophet of the Prairie” for his use of native plants and Midwestern imagery.
Many of Jensen’s original landscape features can still be seen in the EcoLab including stone bridges, spring-water cisterns, and the original trails.
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