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The Missouri Botanical Garden Celebrates 150 Years
Courtesy Missouri Botanical Garden
In 1890, Victorian water lilies accented the pool in front of the 1882 Linnean House, the oldest continuously operated greenhouse conservatory in the United States.
When my wife, Sheryl, and I were renovating a venerable 1909 Craftsman house in the Shaw Neighborhood of south St. Louis in the late ’70s, we would often escape our urban chaos to the timeless order yet endless variety of the nearby Missouri Botanical Garden. The Missouri Botanical Garden is listed on the National Register of Historic Places and widely recognized as one of the top three botanical gardens in the world, along with the Royal (English) Botanic Gardens at Kew and the Singapore Botanic Garden, also celebrating its 150th anniversary. For the scuffling young urban pioneers of thirty years ago, the Missouri Botanical Garden offered a clear vision of a place that revealed enduring quality and value. It still does.
Henry Shaw’s Vision
Young Henry Shaw emigrated from Sheffield, England, to the Missouri frontier in 1819 to make his fame and fortune in the bustling river town of St. Louis. Here he opened a business selling hardware and cutlery, then expanded his prosperous mercantile activities into commodities, mining, furs, and real estate until he retired in 1839 at the ripe old age of thirty-nine. The issue for Henry Shaw then became what to do for an encore. To his everlasting credit, he pursued a long view.
The enormous fluidity of the American frontier before the Civil War made everything seem possible to men of vision, although the war demonstrated that not everyone was allowed to set their sights so far or so high. American philosopher Ralph Waldo Emerson, a contemporary of garden founder Henry Shaw, found healing and inspiration in the limitless possibilities of American nature. Emerson believed that if a person would plant himself firmly in one place, the whole interconnected world would eventually come round to him. The Missouri Botanical Garden is just such a place.
Henry Shaw turned to civic philanthropy many decades in advance of famous American capitalists like Carnegie, Ford, and Rockefeller. Extensive travels in Europe, so typical of the mid-nineteenth century leisure class, encouraged his strong interest in botany and gardening. Shaw thereafter resolved to create a great public garden for St. Louis on the order of the great English and European gardens. In 1851, he began developing a ten-acre site near his country home west of the city limits.
When Dr. George Englemann, a German émigré and one of America’s leading botanists, learned of this exciting new development, he suggested that Shaw create a botanical garden for research and horticultural display rather than just a public park, however beautiful. Assisted by Harvard botanist Asa Gray and Sir William Hooker, director of the Royal Botanic Gardens at Kew, England, as well as Englemann, Henry Shaw opened the Missouri Botanical Garden “for all time for the public good” in 1859.
Oldest Operating Greenhouse
Although the futuristic geodesic dome of the Climatron symbolizes the Botanical Garden to most tourists, for me the historic Linnean House, site of Henry Shaw’s first conservatory, embodies the once-and-future garden. It is the only remaining garden greenhouse that was built during Henry Shaw’s lifetime, matrix of the garden’s botanical activities and, today, the oldest continuously operating greenhouse west of the Mississippi River. Appropriately enough, it was named after Swedish naturalist Carl Linneaus. In the 1700s, Linneaus inaugurated a rather ambitious effort to identify and inventory all the world’s living things. We are now up to 10 percent, by the way, with considerable thanks to the Missouri Botanical Garden and kudos to Noah.
The Linnean House directly aligns with Henry Shaw’s beautiful country estate, Tower Grove House, and the two structures face each other. Tower Grove House illustrates the highly popular Italianate style of the mid-nineteenth century, modeled upon romantic Tuscan country villas. These often featured picturesque outlook towers designed for their wealthy owners to survey their surrounding estates. The 1882 Linnean House, on the other hand, reflects the formal, Georgian symmetry of the famous Crystal Palace of London with its lofty ambitions of bringing reason and order to the world through science. It was designed by noted St. Louis architect George I. Barnett, who also designed the palm house and plant house in nearby Tower Grove Park. The visual relationship between the Tower Grove House and the Linnean House provided a constant reminder in his landscape to Henry Shaw of his direct connection to Linneaus’s own lofty vision of botanical research.
The Linnean House itself offers a valuable benchmark for the greatly enlarged vision of the Missouri Botanical Garden.
It was originally designed in the Victorian tradition of an “orangerie,” a structure used to overwinter palms, tree ferns, and
citrus trees.
After World War I, the Linnean House underwent a major renovation into a cool weather display house instead. Soil was trucked in to create planting beds, and a fountain was created from native Missouri limestone to resemble a natural Meramec River spring in the center of the Linnean House.
In the center of the fountain there is a delightful sculpture by Wheeler Williams of the Greek goddess Amphrite depicted as a little mermaid (or merbaby, to be accurate); classical antiquity seems right at home in the Linnean House. The roof was renovated to its original half-slate, half-glass design in the early 1980s, since Missouri weather takes its inevitable toll even on historic architecture.
Showy plants from the ancient camellia family are the featured attraction in the Linnean House and a subtle reminder of the garden’s prominent role in international botanical research. Not surprisingly then, the Missouri Botanical Garden chose the Linnean House as the logo for the garden’s 150th anniversary. You may have seen the house featured in the annual Tournament of Roses Parade, and it’s also on my green T-shirt that says “The Missouri Botanical Garden: Green for 150 Years.” The Linnean House has evolved from the garden’s primary greenhouse to its symbolic center, mirroring the pattern of America’s urban development from industry to imagery.
Now celebrating its sesquicentennial anniversary, the whole world has come round to the Missouri Botanical Garden while the garden simultaneously reaches out to the entire world “to discover and share knowledge about plants and their environment, in order to preserve and enrich life.” It is truly a world-class center for botany and conservation, environmental education, and horticultural displays, including the arts, as well as one of St. Louis’s leading visitor attractions. Not bad for what was once an uncultivated piece of tallgrass prairie, although don’t be surprised to find the garden involved in prairie restoration efforts of its own. As the choice of the Linnean House for its 150th anniversary logo indicates, the garden’s heritage and its future are closely linked.
Hero for the Planet
In the best Linnean tradition, Dr. Peter H. Raven, president of the Missouri Botanical Garden since 1971, is one of the world’s leading botanists. For many decades, Dr. Raven has championed international research to preserve endangered plants and to promote resource conservation. A leader for numerous national and international scientific organizations, Dr. Raven was selected by Time magazine as one of its “Heroes for the Planet.”
From its humble origins, the Missouri Botanical Garden has become one of the world’s leading centers for botanical research and plant conservation. Garden botanists actively pursue research around the world in thirty-six countries, always carried out in collaboration with institutions from each host country. With its more than six million specimens (Linneaus must be smiling), the garden’s herbarium is one of the six largest in the world and has obviously outgrown the Linnean House. Garden scientists train local botanists to build research capability in countries with the largest biological diversity, since we are also losing species nearly as quickly as we discover them. In addition, the garden’s Center for Conservation and Sustainable Development provides a world-renowned clearinghouse for plant conservation efforts.
Within its seventy-nine acres, the Missouri Botanical Garden hosts a remarkable array of outstanding horticultural displays that would make Henry Shaw snap his suspenders in splendid satisfaction. Inside the world-famous Climatron conservatory, you can see firsthand why the tropical rainforest deserves our considerable interest and attention. You can enjoy 5,400 live trees on the garden grounds, including rare and unusual varieties as well as some specimens planted by Henry Shaw himself.
The garden’s Sassafras Café is Missouri’s first environmentally certified restaurant, a leader in design, recycling, and minimizing the environmental impact of food consumption. The food is also quite excellent.
Double Vision
Urban historian Lewis Mumford concluded that one of the basic functions of a city is to act as a conservatory of the human past, preserving precious specimens for needed future use.
Mumford wrote that “cities are a product of time. They are the molds in which men’s lifetimes have cooled and congealed, giving lasting shape, by way of art, to moments that would otherwise vanish with the living and leave no means of renewal or wider participation behind them.”
From my vantage at the Linnean House conservatory, I can see both how Henry Shaw’s lifetime congealed into the marvelous form of the Missouri Botanical Garden and how it has now become a means of renewal for the entire world as Emerson predicted. After all these years, that double vision has now come into clear focus.
Visit www.mobot.org for more information.
