[6] As a place of recreation,[6] the Arboretum has hiking trails, roadways for driving and bicycling, a 4-acre (16,000 m2) interactive children's garden[7] and a 1-acre (4,000 m2) maze.

Three dozen cuttings from the old burr oak that had been in Lincoln Park Zoo will be grafted onto rootstocks at the Arboretum.

[10] The Arboretum offers an extensive nature-centered education program for children, families, school groups, scouts, and adults, including tree and restoration professionals.

The Natural Areas Conservation Training (N-ACT) Program offers classroom and online courses in ecological restoration techniques.

[14] The arboretum's first superintendent was Clarence E. Godshalk, who had received a master's degree in landscape design from the University of Michigan in 1921.

[15] Joy Morton's Thornhill Estate, established in 1910, formed the core of the Arboretum's original area.

He studied all of this with Floyd Swink, the Arboretum's taxonomist at the time, Robert Betz, a biologist, and David Kropp, a landscape architect.

[19] It holds more than 30,000 books and magazines, as well as tens of thousands of non-book items including prints, original art, letters, photographs, landscape plans and drawings.

The collections focus on plant sciences, especially on trees and shrubs; gardening and landscape design; ecology, with a special interest in Midwestern prairie, savanna, woodland, and wetland ecosystems; natural history; and botanical art.

[20] The Library's Suzette Morton Davidson Special Collections includes books, artwork, historic nursery catalogs, landscape drawings, photographs, letters, maps and institutional documents.

An annual Illumination of tree lights is conducted at the Arboretum from the end of November until early January.