Cece Jabs

Review of Olbrich Botanical Gardens

I've lived in Madison for my whole life and have b...

I've lived in Madison for my whole life and have been visiting Olbrich for as long as I can remember. The gardens are absolutely stunning and I love walking around. However, my low review is because of my experience taking photos at the gardens with friends this May.
Two of my friends and I were planning on dressing up in costumes that we made, and one of our friends is an amateur photographer. We read all the photography guidelines online and paid our $30 fee ahead of time. We arrived early, as they have you schedule a time to do your shoot. Upon our arrival, the woman at the desk told us that we had to wait for the "photoshoot coordinator" arrived. This was confusing to me because we had scheduled our time in advance, so they should have known that we would be there. We ended up waiting around for this person to arrive, cutting into our one hour time frame that we were allotted, only to have the person tell us that we could have started right when our shoot time began.
After beginning, we took a few pictures in the different gardens, and then headed back to the Thai pavilion. Our shoot time was coming to a close at this point, and we knew that. As we were taking pictures, the woman at the desk from earlier had tracked us down to tell us that we had 5 minutes left. We wrapped up and started walking out. Again as we were leaving, she made sure that we were not taking any pictures and followed us inside the building with a suspicious and moody attitude. I'm not sure if she had something against us because of our large costumes, but she treated us like we were doing something wrong even though we were not at all
Overall, Olbrich is a really lovely place to visit. However, I would not recommend doing photo shoots here due to the service we received and for the time we lost due to a rude employee that told us we couldn't start.