Her big surprise was the bees. They arrived when the first crocuses bloomed in March. Soon they were everywhere, swarming the mints and salvias, loving anything that bloomed blue or violet, a buzzing haze around the catmint. Honey from the beehives on the roof of City Hall a few blocks away tastes of Lurie Garden mint.

When Jennifer Davit arrived last spring as the new executive director of Millennium Park's hidden jewel, she knew she was taking on a garden in the middle of a great city. But over her first growing season, she has learned that she is the steward of a veritable wildlife refuge — not just for bees, but for dragonflies, goldfinches and red-winged blackbirds, among others.

In just six years, "it went from being a concrete deck to being this big harbor of life," says Terry Guen, who has been the master landscape architect for Millennium Park since the first plans were laid in 1998.

The 3-acre Lurie Garden, with its sweeping meadow of intermingled perennials against a scrim of skyscrapers, its dancing grasses, its arrow-straight seam of water, its muscular surrounding hedge framed in sculptural black steel, is not what most people expect from a public garden. It is nothing like the traditional style of Grant Park, with its allees of elms, parterres of clipped hedges and beds of annuals.

In most public gardens, you won't find dried stalks and blackened seed heads left standing. You won't find leaves with holes or brown edges as you sometimes do in this garden, where no herbicides or insecticides are used. And that's why you will find birds and bees.

"People are surprised by the type of garden it is," says Davit. "Most people have never seen anything like that. But they really enjoy it."

Faced with the grand but subtle sweep of color and form, "people have an emotional response," Guen says.