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Splendor in the grass at Arboretum

Art at the Arb will feature art and music in the Bartlett Arboretum's setting of tulips and stately trees.

BY ANNIE CALOVICH

The Wichita Eagle

Forty thousand tulips used to bloom this time of year at Bartlett Arboretum 30 minutes south of Wichita in Belle Plaine, giving rise to the town's long-running Tulip Time celebration.

The party continues to this day, but with a bit of a different growth pattern. This weekend, while the town celebrates around it, the nearly 100-year-old arboretum will be pushing up art and music along with its most famous stars: enormous trees that make you feel like you're not in Kansas anymore.

Oh, yes, and some tulips.

"We have 5,000 tulips," says the arboretum's owner-steward, singer Robin Macy. "The whole formal garden is full of tulips."

But Macy, a founding member of the Dixie Chicks, is more intent on the trees that have seen decades of tulips come and go. She started Art at the Arb three years ago as "a way to have the public enjoy the arb and those stately trees," which include a number of the biggest or oldest examples of their type in the state, including a Japanese maple and a river birch.

Macy is taking the occasion to roll out her first solo CD, "Songs From the Garden." It was inspired by the splendor of the setting and the people who have come to cherish it as she has, Macy says.

She will kick off the musical side of the weekend by performing songs from the CD at noon Saturday. Copies of the recording will be sold for $15, with the proceeds going to the arboretum.

Macy and five other musical acts, performing gospel to Gypsy jazz to cowboy croonings, will be performing on anewly built stage to the side of the great lawn of the arboretum. A new treehouse just inside the arboretum will occasionally send forth bagpipe, fiddle and banjo music from 11 feet up.

Elsewhere across the 17 acres, artists will be displaying and selling their work.

The art and artists include the prairie-vista photography of John Morrison, multimedia works of Jo Quillan Tomson, Celtic jewelry by Andrea Gardner, as well as handmade furniture, a blown-glass artist from Collegiate School where Macy teaches geometry, and vintage and new garden accouterments. The Artists of Old Town will be painting on the premises. Echo Landscapes will be there with a trailerful of plants, making porch pots.

Kite-flying will be taught, and kites will be for sale. People can bring picnics, and barbecue will be for sale.

Tulip Time will be going on Saturday in Belle Plaine from 9 a.m. to 5 p.m. Admission is a $2 button.

"So you can go down and buy a funnel cake. You can go to the petting zoo," Macy said. Other Tulip Time events include an arts and crafts fair, a car show, a parade at noon, and a street dance from 8 to 10:30 p.m. For more information, see the Web site www.belleplainechamber.com.

If you go

ART AT THE ARB

What: Display of art and musical entertainment

Where: Bartlett Arboretum in Belle Plaine. From Wichita, take I-35 south to the Mulvane exit.

When: 10 a.m. to 6 p.m. Saturday and Sunday

How much: $5

For more information, go to the Web site www.bartlettarboretum.com.

Reach Annie Calovich at 316-268-6596 or acalovich@wichitaeagle.com.