Horticulture & Hauck: 2025 In Review
By Julie Dennewitz, CGC Horticulturist
2025 saw plenty of positive changes to our Hauck Botanic Garden home as well as in our horticulture program out in the community.
Hauck Botanic Garden Maps
Our efforts to catalog the diverse plant collections at Hauck Botanic Garden continued in 2025 with the addition of three more online garden maps and a printed brochure that visitors can use to navigate the historic eight-acre park. For those who prefer a more guided experience, our free Hauck Arboretum Tours on the third Thursday of each month take participants deep into under-explored parts of the grounds—complete with plenty of history, plant facts and seasonal commentary.
So far, we’ve described five hundred different plant species on our website. Each plant page features a few facts, horticultural tips for proper care and, as we take them, photographs of the plant throughout the year.
Our First BioBlitz
During our BioBlitz—a community event where participants attempt to document as many different forms of life as they can in a set time—volunteers used the community science tool iNaturalist to help identify almost two hundred species. At the end of the day, we gathered to share and compare results. A BioBlitz is a fun way to introduce people to the many plants and animals living around them, and we plan to host more in 2026. Register as a CGC volunteer to stay in the loop!
Even More Plants
The push to expand our diversity continued with a new Micro Prairie Garden along Reading Road. Volunteers assembled on a Saturday morning in May to rip out an entire hillside of weeds and invasive species and replace them with seven species of drought-tolerant native prairie plants. This garden was still looking great even during the driest August on record!
Volunteers from the CHECK Center also planted native strawberries and prickly pears in the Food Forest. And during a rainy fall workday, Hands On at Hauck volunteers enhanced the June Street driveway with even more CGC-grown plugs. In total, we added 500 new plants to Hauck Botanic Garden in 2025.
“Julie was the first person I met at the CGC in August of 2024. Her unstoppable enthusiasm for plants and trees and all aspects of their care is an absolute joy to experience. She extends a warm welcome to all of us who volunteer, readily sharing her knowledge and stories of experiences of managing the natural world. Thank you being a guiding light for all of us.”
Veggie Garden Upgrades
Big things happened this year in our Vegetable Garden too: We installed a solar-powered rainwater capture system and a new picnic table, and volunteers cleared out a dying tree to make room for even more veggies. Our goal is to continue renovating the space in 2026 to create a better outdoor classroom and educate visitors on the many different ways they can grow food in their own backyards.
Pollinator Garden Partnerships
Building on the success of 2024’s Community Action Agency and Evans Field pollinator garden partnerships, this year we installed two new gardens in the Cincinnati community with the help of our amazing volunteers.
The first was a multi-part project on Dewey Avenue in West Price Hill. In August, volunteers assembled for a sweaty day of clearing invasive species from the site. Then in October, students from Thomas Moore College put in a morning of hard work to prepare and mulch the future garden beds. Finally, an eclectic group of all ages came together on a chilly Saturday in November to install nearly two hundred native perennials, trees and shrubs, transforming the once-vacant lot into a community pocket park.
Our second project was a lot closer to home—right across Oak Street at the new Hamilton County Crisis Center. In early October, CGC volunteers and participants in the Talbert House’s Youth Employment Program joined forces to plant a new garden along the front of the building, where visitors to the center will be greeted by a bouquet of native flowers and grasses.
“Our partnership with the Civic Garden Center has brought meaningful, hands‑on programming to the Hamilton County Crisis Center, creating opportunities for clients and staff to connect with nature in ways that support grounding, wellness and healing. We’re genuinely excited about this collaboration because it blends horticulture, mindfulness and community engagement into experiences that enrich our environment and strengthen the support we provide to clients of the Hamilton County Crisis Center.”
Little Free Library
Near the end of 2025, we added a new feature to our grounds: a Little Free Library! Located near the main CGC building next to our flying pig statue, it’s ready to welcome visitors. We’re grateful to the Peaslee Neighborhood Center for writing the grant that funded the library and to Bobby, the awesome volunteer who helped us install this fun free resource for our community.
Looking Ahead
The CGC has had the privilege of using Hauck Botanic Garden as our outdoor classroom for 74 years. In that time, the park’s health and success has always reflected our own. In 2026, we’ll be continuing to uplift each other with new themed gardens that better reflect the content in our native plant classes as well as an adult Horticulture Summer Camp program that fully celebrates this horticultural treasure. We’ll also continue cataloging the species growing here and finding new ways to add habitat and biodiversity.
Our partnership with the Hamilton County Crisis Center, which began with the planting described above, will be deepening in 2026: We have plans to offer hands-on garden education and classes to the Crisis Center’s residents. It’s been proven that time in nature has a healing effect, and we hope that small moments in the garden will have a big impact on this vulnerable population’s recovery journey.
We also have pollinator garden partnerships planned at Cincinnati Urban Promise and Mt. Airy Commons. Stay tuned for details!