Lincoln's Garden Rooms: Sunken Gardens, Pioneers Park and the Antelope Valley Greenway
A terraced garden built in the Depression, a 668-acre nature park with bison, and a greenway stitching the city — Lincoln's green infrastructure works hardest in the quiet months.
Lincoln's parks make an argument about what a prairie city owes itself. The Sunken Gardens — built in 1930-31 as a Depression-era works project on a former dumpsite at 27th and D — remain the city's jewel box: terraced beds, a lily pond, and annual plantings that draw wedding parties and photographers through the frost line.
Across the city, Pioneers Park spreads 668 acres of prairie, woodland and lawn at Lincoln's southwest edge, with the Pioneers Park Nature Center's 862 surrounding acres of tallgrass prairie, a bison herd, and hiking trails that give Lincoln an honest piece of the ecosystem it replaced. School buses have unloaded there for generations; the nature center's programs run year-round.
Between them, the Antelope Valley project and the city's trail system — more than 130 miles of trails, among the most extensive per capita in the region — turned a flood-control corridor into the greenway spine that connects downtown, the university and the neighborhoods.
November is the parks' structural season: the Sunken Gardens' beds rest (after the traditional fall ritual in which volunteers and the public helped harvest the garden's tropical plants for overwintering), the prairie at Pioneers Park goes gold and dormant, and the trails belong to runners, dog walkers and the cross-country skiers waiting on first snow.
Lincoln's parks department also runs the city's golf courses, pools and recreation centers — the winter half of that system, the indoor season, takes over now.
Prairie cities are sometimes accused of having no scenery. Lincoln's answer is that it built its scenery — garden by garden, trail by trail — and November, when the crowds thin and the bones show, may be its most honest display.
