Henry Shaw’s Victorian Landscapes:
The Missouri Botanical Garden and Tower Grove Park
Carol Grove

Foreword by Peter H. Raven, afterword by John Karel

Published by University of Massachusetts Press in association with LALH

Cloth $39.95

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Winner, 2007 Independent Publisher Bronze Medal in Regional Nonfiction

“Henry Shaw made magnificent contributions to his adopted city, and his influence continues to grow nearly 120 years after his death. Few of the great fortunes amassed in St. Louis during the nineteenth century made a lasting mark, but this enigmatic, private Yorkshireman certainly employed his to good purpose and to the benefit of a future he could only have imagined.”—Professor Peter H. Raven, Director, Missouri Botanical Garden, and Engelmann Professor of Botany, Washington University in St. Louis

“This study by Carol Grove significantly advances our understanding of the background of Tower Grove Park and the Missouri Botanical Garden. Her research has marshaled known sources and also made some new connections that help to illuminate this period in the history of American landscape design through the prism of one visionary philanthropist’s experiences.”—John Karel, Director, Tower Grove Park

AT THE AGE OF EIGHTEEN, Henry Shaw (1800–1889) left his home in Sheffield, England, to import manufactured goods from St. Louis on the Mississippi and Missouri Rivers. Two decades of financial success allowed him to relinquish his business operations and take up more genteel pursuits. In 1840 he began nearly ten years of travel, which exposed him to museums and botanical gardens in Europe, Asia Minor, and Russia. He also visited Chatsworth, in Derbyshire, England, where he saw Joseph Paxton’s arboretum and the duke of Devonshire’s world-class botanical collection. He vowed to create a similar cultural enterprise in St. Louis.

Over the next three decades, Shaw transformed his estate, Tower Grove, into one of the nation’s leading botanical gardens. Shaw’s Garden (now the Missouri Botanical Garden) opened in 1859 to legions of wildly enthusiastic visitors. Over the next thirty years, Shaw expanded the plantings, drawing on the species newly discovered by the era’s great plant hunters. In 1867 he began work on Tower Grove Park, a stretch of 276 acres adjacent to the garden. Despite the rising popularity of Frederick Law Olmsted’s pastoral style, Shaw again chose to design with a gardenesque method that emphasized plants as specimens, in keeping with his educational mission. He carefully labeled all trees and ornamented the landscape with Oriental-inspired pavilions and summerhouses.

Carol Grove chronicles Shaw’s remarkable story, from his early love of plants to his rising social conscience and his determined quest to create a place of unsurpassed beauty and distinction that would educate and thereby improve American citizens. Beautifully illustrated with contemporary and historical photographs, this volume offers an insightful cultural history of Shaw’s landscapes, among the most important examples of the gardenesque in America.