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Celebrating Shaw’s garden
(by Kara Krekeler - May 18, 2009)
In 1859, there wasn’t much to St. Louis. City limits stopped at Grand Avenue and quickly gave way to open countryside. Washington University was just 6 years old, and Forest Park’s dedication was still more than 15 years away.
But 1859 saw the opening of the Missouri Botanical Garden, the oldest continually operating botanical garden in the country. This year the Garden is in the midst of celebrating its 150th anniversary with a gala celebration, lectures, historical tours and temporary attractions, including a working Victorian floral clock made of more than 5,000 individual plants.
On June 1, botanist Stephen Hopper will give a lecture on the global network of botanical gardens. Hopper is the current director of London’s Royal Botanic Gardens, Kew, which inspired St. Louis entrepreneur Henry Shaw to found the Missouri Botanical Garden and this year celebrates its 250th anniversary. The free lecture takes place at 2 p.m. in the first-floor lecture hall of the Garden’s Monsanto Center, 4500 Shaw Blvd.
And on June 15 — the Garden’s official anniversary — and 16, Garden volunteer Alan Stentz will lead tours of the historic trees of the Garden, which include several that predate the institution and others that were planted during Shaw’s lifetime.
For more information on these and other 150th anniversary events, visit www.mobot.org.
From industry to luxury
While the Garden first opened to the public in 1859, its roots are much deeper in the past. In 1818, Shaw, then a young English businessman, came to the U.S. to find a steel shipment that was lost en route to New Orleans. After finding the shipment, which was sent by his father’s company, Shaw traveled up the Mississippi River to St. Louis to sell the goods.
At first, Shaw had difficulty deciding whether or not he should stay in what was then a small village. Eventually he determined that the village’s geographic location would be well-suited for a store providing hardware for pioneers heading west, and in 1823 opened a store in what is now downtown St. Louis.
“He was very on top of what was hot, what was needed,” said Andrew Colligan, archivist for the Garden. “Furs, oils — whatever someone needed, he provided it.”
Through a combination of Shaw’s business savvy and the fact that he was able to import quality steel goods from his family in Sheffield, England — which was renowned for its steel-working industry — while charging less than his competitors, Shaw managed to amass a fortune and retire at the age of 40 and set about traveling the world, although by that point he had adopted St. Louis as his home.
While these basic facts of Shaw’s life are well-documented, it’s not as easy to figure out his personality or glean what led a businessman from the world of steel and hardware to become so captivated with the world of plants.
“His business papers are highly detailed, but his personal correspondence is pretty thin,” Colligan said.
Only Shaw’s travel journals give us a glimpse at what sort of person he was, Colligan said. Those journals, which are being published in daily installments on the Garden’s website throughout its sesquicentennial year, detail Shaw’s voyages around the world in the 1840s and ’50s.
During three trips abroad, Shaw visited several parks and gardens in Europe and, in his journals, expressed his awe at them, including London’s Kew Gardens and the Crystal Palace, a massive glass-and-iron exhibition hall built for the 1851 World’s Fair. While there, Shaw decided to create something similar, but on a smaller scale, in St. Louis.
He had already purchased land for his country estate and in 1856, Shaw sought the advice of the Kew’s director, Sir William Jackson Hooker, as to how he should go about creating a botanical garden in St. Louis. Hooker put Shaw in contact with Dr. George Engelmann, a St. Louis gynecologist and amateur botanist, who in turn introduced Shaw to Asa Gray, one of the foremost naturalists in America at that time.
Prior to the Garden’s public opening on June 15, 1959, Hooker, Gray and Engelmann had convinced Shaw that the Missouri Botanical Garden should also house a research library and herbarium, a collection of dried plants used for research and reference. In 1857, Shaw sent Engelmann on a trip to Europe to buy several volumes that would become the basis for the Garden’s library, as well as a 600-specimen herbarium from the estate of a German plant collector. Today, the library holds more than 120,000 volumes and the herbarium boasts more than 6 million plant specimens.
“Shaw was not a horticulturalist or botanist. He simply had the vision and money to carry it out,” Colligan said.
An evolving attraction
Of course, when the Botanical Garden first opened, it looked very little like it does today. Some of today’s most popular attractions — including the Climatron and several of the themed gardens — weren’t created until a century later.
“Initially, when developing the plans, Shaw considered having a more parklike atmosphere,” something akin to Tower Grove Park today, Colligan said, noting that as Shaw owned that property as well, Tower Grove Park would have been included in the early designs.
Instead of a wide variety of plant specimens and garden styles, the Garden originally was almost solely Victorian in style with geometric floral patterns, water lilies and observation towers, Colligan said. Tower Grove Park even boasted a hedge maze similar to the one that’s now in the Victorian Garden. One exception was a working farm (situated approximately where the Japanese Garden is today), which provided food for Shaw’s table.
Other early features included a sunken garden where the reflecting pools are today; an arboretum, which was more parklike; and a conservatory built in 1868 to house cacti and Mediterranean plants.
“There were no themed gardens like we have today,” Colligan said. “Most of the plants used were readily available in nurseries here.”
Upon Shaw’s death in 1889, Tower Grove Park was given to the city, while the Garden remained a private institution, led by a board of trustees. In the 1850s, Shaw went to state legislators so that his 760 acres could be set aside as an institution that was open to the public, yet not under government rule, as he didn’t want his Garden to be tied up in “city hall wrangling,” Colligan said.
While the evolving board of trustees has stuck to Shaw’s decree that it keep the Garden easily accessible and “forever kept up and maintained for the cultivation and propagation of plants,” the Garden has seen its ups and downs over the years.
In the 1920s, the growth of the city of St. Louis caused a major pollution problem for the Garden, making it impossible to grow delicate orchids in greenhouses in the city, and in 1923, the board of trustees was forced to sell the 50-acre arboretum (which was located just west of the Garden) in order to buy land in what is now west St. Louis County in order to continue growing the plants.
Over the next few decades, the Garden suffered from stagnation brought on by the Great Depression and World War II. “Displays were static, structures were in disrepair,” and the number of visitors was declining from year to year, Colligan said. “The Garden was running on a shoestring budget for more than a couple decades.”
It wasn’t until the late 1950s and the construction of the Climatron that the Garden began to gain back some of its appeal with the community. That popularity climb received another boost when current director Peter Raven took the helm in 1972.
Colligan said that Raven has been responsible for a large portion of the Garden’s evolution over the years; since he took the position, he has launched a master plan, opened several themed gardens — including the Ottoman garden, the children’s garden, the Japanese garden and the Chinese garden — and increased the Garden’s membership from 4,000 to 40,000.
“The Garden’s grounds have changed more in Peter Raven’s tenure than it did in the 60 years prior to it. It’s been quite dramatic,” Colligan said.
And while no one can be sure what Shaw would have thought of these changes, Colligan said that, judging by Shaw’s travel journals — in which he described the various foreign botanical gardens — he would have liked how his Garden has turned out.
“I think [Shaw would] be pleased that the Garden and Tower Grove Park have continued as he intended,” Colligan said. “The Garden has become compartmentalized, but it still follows what he started.”
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