On the evening of October 2, the Foellinger-Freimann Botanical Conservatory will smell less like mulch and more like a roastery. Botanical Brew, the downtown conservatory's autumn tasting event, takes over the indoor and outdoor gardens from 5 to 10 p.m., with local and regional makers pouring coffee, tea, beer, wine, cider and mead. Admission is $10, and drinks are sold by the glass or as packaged bottles and cans to take home.
The format is unusual for Fort Wayne, which has no shortage of beer festivals but few places to sample a cold-brew pour and a dry mead under the same roof as a chocolate tree. Botanical Brew has been running for years, and it has always been a hybrid: part tasting room, part craft market, part evening stroll. Artisan vendors set up among the plantings, food vendors feed the crowd, and live performers play while guests wander between the showcase garden and the outdoor terrace. Past editions have drawn local vendors serving coffee, tea, cider, craft beer and wine, with food trucks and entertainers on hand.
What makes the setting distinctive is the building itself, and the building has a story. The conservatory opened in 1983 after two years of construction, at a cost of about $4.5 million, funded by the City of Fort Wayne, the Foellinger Foundation, the Freimann Charitable Trust, and a local attorney named Bill Sowers. Lincoln National Corporation created an endowment to help maintain it. The idea, according to the conservatory's own account, began with two friends who liked to visit gardens around the world together: Helene Foellinger, then publisher of the Fort Wayne News-Sentinel, and Sowers, an attorney and trustee. Helene's mother, Esther, is credited with the original inspiration. Traveling abroad, she had seen plants she wanted people in Fort Wayne to be able to see too, including residents who might never have the chance to travel as she had.
That impulse, to bring distant landscapes home, is still the conservatory's operating principle. The facility is owned and operated by the Fort Wayne Parks and Recreation Department, and its general manager, Nate Cardelli, has described it as part of the fabric of the city, a Parks and Recreation facility that is downtown to stay. Inside its roughly 24,500 square feet of indoor gardens, visitors can find a cafe, a gift shop, art, a mascot called Woody the Tree, and a collection that runs to some 2,000 plants from about 1,000 varieties, including 72 types of cactus. The full grounds, indoor and out, cover about 100,000 square feet, with a tropical oasis display and waterfall, a Sonoran Desert display, and an outdoor exploration garden.
Botanical Brew's timing places it inside one of the conservatory's four annual showcase exhibits. This year's summer and fall showcase is Pueblo Garden: Styles of the Southwest, on display from June 27 through November 15 during public hours. The exhibit explores the landscapes, colors and horticultural traditions of the American Southwest, with adobe-inspired structures and a look at Pueblo gardening techniques and the resourcefulness of growing in arid environments. For a tasting event built around brewed drinks, the pairing is apt: mead, cider and beer are all ancient fermented beverages, and the exhibit's focus on Indigenous approaches to growing in dry country sits a few steps from a desert display full of cacti.
The conservatory runs four changing showcases a year, along with a steady calendar of horticultural programs, youth education, concerts and workshops. Botanical Brew is one of the recurring special events that memberships help support, listed alongside the Great Train Connection and ROOTS Music Fest as signature programming. It is also, for a certain kind of Fort Wayne evening, a rare thing: an after-hours look at a garden that most visitors only see in daylight, with a glass in hand and music in the next room.
Tickets are $10 at the door, and the conservatory sits at 1100 South Calhoun Street, with a parking lot on the east side of the building off Calhoun and additional street and garage parking nearby. Beverages by the glass and packaged drinks will be available for purchase. For anyone who has only ever walked the conservatory's paths in quiet daylight, the appeal is straightforward: the same gardens, the same desert, the same waterfall, poured into an evening instead of an afternoon.