PHOTOgraph BY DEVYN GLISTA
The little house stands less than two feet tall. In size, if not aesthetic, it’s comparable to Barbie’s dream house. Dried moss grows organically around the edges of honey locust pod shingles. Sticks trim a door made of bark, a tiny pinecone centered at the top like a jaunty flower. Just to the door’s right, a small window holds glass made of poured resin, with mullions of winged euonymus—better known as burning bush.
There are no precise right angles, which adds to the feeling that a gnome might poke her head out at any time and invite us in for a sip of tea. Or dew. Or whatever it is gnomes drink. If it’s being served in this house, it’s going to taste like fairy dust and honey.
This botanical model is the first thing Paul Busse built, in 1991. It lives in his daughter’s office, a reminder to Laura Busse Dolan and everyone else who works at Applied Imagination of the company’s roots—and seeds.
On its website, Applied Imagination calls its creations “installations.” The buildings and creatures made of botanical materials are meant to pair with model train displays. During an August visit, the artists and staff worked on a model of the National Underground Railroad Freedom Center to add to the Krohn Conservatory’s holiday show. (The display of Cincinnati building miniatures opens on November 11.) Applied Imagination has also worked with the New York Botanical Garden since 1992, and it has pieces in such locales as the Biltmore Estate in Asheville, North Carolina; the U.S. Botanic Garden in Washington, D.C.; and the Chicago Botanic Garden.
These details, though, don’t quite capture the art of what’s created in the workspace in Alexandria, Kentucky. It’s one thing to see, for example, the 8-foot Tyrannosaurus Rex that greeted visitors at the Krohn Conservatory this summer, a dinosaur that, unless you looked really closely, appeared to be made of the same material as a dino at any museum space.
It’s quite another thing to watch Kaitlin Peed Schmidt stand on an 18-inch tall hunk of Styrofoam and use a reciprocating saw to round out what will turn into a red spotted mushroom cap, with horse chestnut serving as the white dots. She’s working on one of those 90-plus-degree August days. To shape the mushroom-cap mound, she has to duck out from under a portable tent set up to keep the most brutal of the sun’s rays from baking her skin.
The ground is littered with piles of foam flakes. They dust the grass and work table, coating her forearms and the front of her jean shorts. But this, apparently, is nothing compared to the foamstorm kicked up during the making of the Krohn dinosaurs. “As you see, it gets very messy very fast,” says Schmidt. “Those days, I would just be covered in foam. It’s very static-y. There’s the long-neck dino you’ll see at Krohn, and there’s a picture of me underneath it [at the workshop] making a foam snow angel. We have fun.”
PHOTOgraph BY JASON RITTER
Applied Imagination is a company with full-time employees and benefits—time off, dental, all that—but there’s nothing “corporate” about this group. Getting to the building requires a road so winding a toddler might have drawn it. When you turn off the road, you cross a bridge, and the drive is the first on the left. “More than likely, there will be model train tracks in the driveway,” Dolan warns, “so just park anywhere, even if you have to park someone in. It’s a little full out there.”
Upon arrival, Maple greets you. She’s a mutt, though there’s almost certainly some lab in there, and you swear the dog smiles when she sees you. She’ll allow a pat, but this isn’t a dog that wants to cuddle. Maple wanders the workshop, inside and out, like she runs the place.
She’s 3 years old and belongs to Schmidt, who’s had her since the dog was about three months old. Maple has been going to the workshop for nearly that whole time. She and the other animals lurking around—including a cat named Garfield—add to the sense that Applied Imagination is a family affair.
Paul Busse launched the company in 1991, just a year before he installed his first pieces at both Krohn and New York Botanical Garden conservatories. It’s been 31 years, and both of those shows are still running today.
Busse, whom Dolan calls the company’s “founding visionary,” studied architecture at Miami University. When he realized he didn’t want a desk job, he transferred to Ohio State University to study landscape architecture. He entered the field back in the 1970s to design creative residential living spaces; think of a gorgeous backyard with a giant deck, a patterned brick patio, and bright landscaping.
Applied Imagination mixes landscape architecture with Busse’s lifelong obsession with trains. “I can remember as a kid we would go stand at real train tracks and wait for a special train to come through town that would rush by,” Dolan says. “That was the most thrilling thing as a kid, seeing real steam trains with my dad.”
PHOTOgraph BY DEVYN GLISTA
He loved small trains, too. Applied Imagination uses G-scale trains, which are 1:24 scale and were the first model trains to run both indoors and outdoors.
Busse created his first public display in 1982, for the Ohio State Fair. He didn’t get paid for it. To save money and finish everything in time, he slept on-site in a sleeping bag, Dolan says. He borrowed trains from a friend who owned a local hobby store.
Today, Busse lives in a home about 150 feet from Applied Imagination. In 2016, he asked his daughter to take over the company. Everyone knew his time to step down was coming; Busse was diagnosed with Parkinson’s disease around 2006. Today, his Parkinson’s is late stage. He struggles with talking and walking, but his caretaker brings him to the workshop, where Busse moved the company in the early 2000s. Before then, Applied Imagination was located in the teeny basement of a carriage house in Northside.
Busse’s vision outgrew the basement, and it’s outgrown the workshop, too. “We stay here so that he can come and see what we do now and enjoy where this company is headed,” says Dolan.
Today, her office alone is larger than that original basement space. The full company includes four pole barns, each 30 to 50 feet wide and 50 to 75 feet long. The leasable collection is stored in seven storage units.
Dolan built models for Applied Imagination while in high school and college, but she never intended for it to become her full-time career. She was in advertising as a brand leader when Busse told her he wanted her to take over. “I think you’re the best fit for it,” Dolan remembers her father telling her. “We can’t clone me, but you’re the closest thing to it.”
While this path wasn’t her original plan, she says, she knows it was the right choice. “It wasn’t something that was ever in the cards, but now, being involved since 2017, it’s absolutely the right path,” she says. “I find so much joy in carrying on this company.”
PHOTOgraph BY DEVYN GLISTA
That includes leading the team she’s assembled. In an early decision, Dolan brought back Stephanie Winters as creative director; she’d worked with Busse in the ’90s as an artist. The pair’s tight friendship goes back decades. When they tell a story, they speak over the other, praise the other, and slip off on tangents.
Dolan: “She helped me pick my first prom dress.”
Winters: “That’s how I met you. The prom dress, I was like, Let’s look at it.”
Dolan: “We bonded over fashion.”
Winters: “I was in her wedding.”
Dolan: “Maid of honor.”
Winters: “The cool thing is, we’ll come up with ideas. She’s been my muse for some stuff, too. We like fashion and music. But she’s like, I need a wedding headpiece, and I’d never made one. It didn’t exist.”
Dolan: “I wanted a 1920s, what are those called? Coronets?
Winters: “Coronet? Not bayonet.”
Dolan: “It’s like a crown. You can find them on Etsy, but they’re all destroyed.”
Winters: “Did we have Etsy back then?”
Dolan: “We did. It was the beginnings of it, but all of them were so aged, you would have looked more like you were dressing up for a haunted house. But luckily…”
Winters: “I’ll jump at any challenge.”
Dolan: “She hand-beaded this thing for me.”
In addition to 10 or so folks who serve as contractors, traveling with the company to set up exhibits from Michigan to New York, Applied Imagination currently employs about 15 full-time workers, including artists.
PHOTOgraph BY DEVYN GLISTA
Tucked in a narrow space in the pole barn that also houses Dolan’s office, Annie Gessendorf is bent over quietly making dandelions from bamboo, ball gourds, and fiber optic wires. She’s drilled small holes through the golf ball-sized gourd and threads the fiber optic wires through the holes, hot gluing them in place. A tiny wedge light is in the center of the gourd, which lights up the fiber optic ends and refracts the light through the other end of the wire, creating a glowing orb of dandelion fluff.
“This is the stuff that really gets me,” says Gessendorf. “I’ve become kind of the lighting specialist here. I’ve gotten to learn a lot over the years.”
That’s sort of how it works at Applied Imagination: When an artist gets excited about a project, Dolan lets them dive in. It’s how Schmidt, too, ended up as the primary artist on the Krohn Conservatory’s T. rex, which she named Rexy Emieran Schmidt (Rexy because, obviously; Emieran is a nod to her coworkers, Emily and Kieran; and Schmidt eponymously). Rexy served as a sort of centerpiece to the conservatory’s First Flowers exhibit, which ran July 1 to October 22. Schmidt also sculpted the forms of most of the show’s other dinos and pollinators.
“You really gotta wrap your head around how those animals’ anatomy works,” says Schmidt. “One time I did the gecko, and I just doused my brain with all these different images of the gecko to really understand their movement. I’ve always had a great love of sculpting animals, so when the dinosaurs came around, I was like, Let’s goooo! I would be the person who’d stay in college just to keep learning new things, and this place definitely provides that for me. There are enough different things going on and new techniques to learn that it keeps me occupied for sure.”
Instead of filing cabinets full of documents, the workshop drawers stacked on open floor-to-ceiling shelves are full of artists’ material. Chinese wisteria seeds, lotus pod seed, hibiscus flower, and eastern red cedar are in small, clear drawers that might otherwise house nuts, bolts, and screws. Dawn redwood cones, Casuarina pods, and red canella berries are in short, wide drawers that might otherwise hold manila file folders. Cut mahogany pods, whole mahogany pods, and sweet gum balls are in tall, deep drawers that could otherwise store sweaters and socks in your bedroom closet. Locust thorns in a shoebox-sized clear container have stiff, orange petals. They’re a cheerful pop of color among the mostly tan, sepia, and brown beans, seeds, pods, and shells.
Around the corner, bunches of tall, slim reeds and fronds are grouped in industrial-sized buckets like the warehouse section of a Michael’s. Twisty, misshapen gourds hang from a fishing net tacked near the ceiling over a doorway. Boxes of Ming moss are tucked in open plywood shelves. The moss is one the newer materials for Applied Imagination, Dolan says. As the artists are hired to make more dinosaurs, mammals, and insects, they’re also needing more materials to mimic skin and hair.
Photograph by Jason Ritter
Despite the sheer amount of material, not just any botanical will work. “We can’t use any edible parts of the plants,” says Dolan. “We can use the top of an acorn, but we can’t use the actual acorn itself because little critters live in conservatories and gardens and will eat them. That’s absolutely something we learned the hard way.”
Dolan recounts an early story of her father’s: She doesn’t recall the specific building, but it included a collection of small lampposts made out of acorns. Busse came back the next day to see all the lampposts mysteriously—or perhaps not so mysteriously—gone. “Even with the coatings that we use to kind of preserve everything,” says Dolan, “the critters still found a snack.”
These art supplies come from, well, everywhere. On this late summer Friday, the company had just gotten a shipment of 100 gourds from a farmer in Georgia. The botanical gardens they work with help the artists harvest and collect materials. Applied will purchase from dry natural plant suppliers and import things they can’t get in the U.S. from a supplier in the Netherlands, and employees are known to collect botanicals themselves.
“Just last week, we took an entire day and foraged at a big property of a family member of one of the artists here and picked up cool things we can create with,” Dolan says. “A lot of times we’re just out in the forest shopping.”
They can “shop” on their own grounds, too, and they’ve planted items they harvest from often, she says. They get a lot of their pinecones from a hemlock tree out back, and the contorta bush has perfect twisty branches.
Applied Imagination is mindful of what it harvests, trying to take material that won’t affect the forest: downed trees and their bark, pods and pinecones that have fallen off branches. But the one live plant it cuts is lovingly called “ditch willow.” It grows in, yes, ditches, and helps prevent erosion. Cutting it encourages more root systems to grow, which helps the local forests and waterways.
Unlike other companies that manufacture displays, Applied Imagination isn’t trying to create exact to-scale models. Consider that early Busse construction living in Dolan’s office, the one that looks like a home for gnomes. That’s the grown-from-the-earth spirit that Applied artists try to capture. “We can whittle these materials down to be the exact, perfect everything, but then it’s not interesting,” says Dolan. “We might as well have made it out of plastic.”
It’s why the material selection is so important, says Winters, the creative director. “You want to express little arches and keystones and all the details, but you also want to be mindful of maintaining the natural materials,” she says. “Otherwise, it’ll just look like something that was manufactured. That’s what we’re trying not to do. Because it’s a sculpture as well. It’s an architectural model, but you want to sculpt with the plant materials.”
Take the catalpa branches on the Freedom Center project that Applied Imagination is working on during my late summer visit. To create the building’s iconic swooping roof, Winters wove catalpa, a flowering tree, to create a thatched look.
“It doesn’t really look like that in real life, right, because it’s metal siding material,” says Winters. “It’s the same color, but that’s where we lean more toward the botanical material side and away from exactness. But when you look at it, you still see [the Freedom Center]. And then maybe it makes some kind of harmony, the two things together.”
Similarly, some of the changes the artists make in their designs serve to ensure the finished piece looks more accurate than were they to follow a to-scale blueprint. “Paul was also really big on focusing on the details that you remember most in your mind,” says Dolan. “If you look at our model of the Capitol building in Washington, D.C., you would absolutely say, This is the Capitol building. It’s a beautiful model. But he truncated the wings on that thing, probably more than half.”
If her father hadn’t made the change, says Dolan, the finished model would have stretched 12 feet on either side. “So instead he brought the more iconic ends of the building in closer to the center dome. No one in the history of that display has complained, because that’s what people remember in their minds—they see the dome, they see the wings.”
Photograph by Jason Ritter
The wonder at the creations is real. Spend 20 minutes at the Krohn’s First Flowers exhibit, and the soundtrack will be punctuated by gasps—usually children, often at the T. rex. “Mom, look at the dinosaur,” a small girl points, running up to Rexy. “Want your picture with it?” Mom asks, and the girl poses with the 8-foot model.
The next kid who runs at Rexy can’t talk yet. He’s so small he doesn’t seem like he should be able to walk, but he darts right to the model. His dad scoops him up and poses for a photo as well.
Rexy, clearly, is famous. And Krohn confirms his fame—and the fame of the full exhibit. “It’s by far our most popular summer and fall show ever,” says Mark House, Krohn’s manager. “It set attendance records and revenue records.”
Just about everything Applied Imagination makes for Krohn is a hit. Consider the first buildings it constructed for Krohn’s holiday show—the botanical architecture took up just half a room. “It was funny because it was so obvious: People were drawn to the Cincinnati landmarks that Applied Imagination did, like a magnet,” says House. “Half the room was empty. The people weren’t looking at the plants or the flowers or the poinsettias. They went to the holiday display that Applied Imagination did.”
So the show has expanded each year. It now takes up three of Krohn’s four rooms and will eventually expand to all four.
Jarrod McNertney, Applied Imagination’s lead engineer, heads the fabrication team responsible for constructing bridges and large trestles to support the model trains. He’s also the foreman on on-site installations, which usually require six to 25 people.
He works out logistics: How will models get to the location? Or fit in the truck? How many vehicles are needed? Logistically, he knew that 8-foot-tall Rexy would need to be chopped in half. “It’s hard to find a truck that it would fit in,” he says. “And the weight was a challenge as well.”
McNertney schedules crews and leads the onsite team in plotting out track and bridge locations in and around the buildings. Setup occurs so often, it becomes a fairly standard step-by-step process, but he still needs to improvise, whether it’s because of weather, incorrect info from a client, or a mistaken draft layout.
McNertney has a background in sculpture, and in his 12 years at the company he learned drafting directly under Busse. As he discusses his favorite material to work with—willow, because it’s so easy to cut and so fun to harvest—a flurry of white swirls outside of Dolan’s office window.
Thought No. 1: But it’s 90 degrees outside!
Thought No. 2: Wait…Styrofoam mushrooms.
Schmidt, it would seem, is working the saw again and causing a foamstorm.
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