Blossoming venture: traditional picnic site becomes draw for tourism as botanical garden.

SINCE 1968, VISITORS TO THE famous Blue Spring area near Eureka Springs have taken one glance at the rolling, wooded lands and informed Steve Chyrchel he should turn it into a botanical garden.

Topography is apparently destiny because the beautiful Eureka Springs Gardens has indeed bloomed on this White River peninsula, with a grand opening held June 11 for the state's first such endeavor.

"The planning for this started almost six years ago," says Chyrchel, a carrot-haired transplant from Illinois who has spent $1.5 million during the past year-and-a-half to make his botanical dream come true.

Locals apparently have held picnics on the Blue Spring peninsula since at least 1879, when a second mill was built on the site to replace one burned during Civil War action in northwest Arkansas. The owners began charging admission in 1948.

In 1965, the 250-acre peninsula was closed to the public by the latest owner, an elderly lady who felt she could no longer keep up the property. She began looking for a buyer and eventually came up with Chyrchel, whose father had scouted the territory as an investment.

"What I saw was an area that was just beginning to do something," Chyrchel says of Eureka Springs.

Half of the downtown stores were closed, but the first half-season of the Great Passion Play had been held in 1967 with positive results for the area.

Fresh out of college, Chyrchel reopened Blue Spring and built a little mill wheel and a small theater.

When he decided to "go for it" six years ago, he sought professional advice from several of the most renowned horticulturists in the country. His main adviser was Carl Totemeier, former head of horticulture at the New York Botanical Gardens, who was moving to northwest Arkansas at the time.

The time was well-spent.

A typical visitor enters the gardens down a steep hillside, carved with terraced rock beds of flowering annuals and shaded by native hardwoods. A staircase winds down the hill through the scenery, then cuts around the well-known bright blue lagoon fed by Blue Spring. The spring itself has been enclosed into a pool with a decorative retaining wall and is surrounded by 100 red and pink shrub roses.

Shady Alternative

Rounding the lagoon, a visitor may enter the woodland garden, a shady hardwood hillside traversed by a long swath of switchback ramps. Underneath the trees are a variety of shrubs, small trees and bedding plants in bright, eye-catching colors.

The gardens also are accessible for handicapped visitors. A level path to the lagoon area can be reached by car, and wheelchairs can be used on the ramps through the woodland garden.

Though the scenery and plantings are beautiful, visitors should remember that this is a work in progress, and a few rough edges here and there are to be expected.

Phase 1 of the gardens' development represents 33 acres of a 250-acre site. Phase 2, which shouldn't be too far away, will include a wedding garden -- a major source of revenue -- and a Japanese garden. Streams through the Japanese Garden will be moved along by solar-powered pumps.

"One thing I really want to do is put in a large water show," Chyrchel adds. "We'll then light the garden for evening. A walk through a garden at night is a totally different experience."

As the years pass, the privately owned Eureka Springs Gardens should prove to be a major regional attraction.

While most botanical gardens in the country are located on flat land in an urban area, Eureka Springs Gardens is a slice of the Ozark Mountains.

The garden is only an hour's drive from the tourist boom town of Branson, Mo., 5 1/2 miles west of Eureka Springs off U.S. Highway 62, and is open May-November.