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Preservation Case Study: Missouri Botanical Garden The Missouri Botanical Garden grew out of the passion and generosity of a prosperous St. Louis businessman, Henry Shaw, in the mid-nineteenth century. Today the garden not only is still extant and thriving, but also has grown into a world-class botanical research, conservation, and educational institution. Although the landscape and plantings have changed over time, generations of stewards have managed to preserve the element most crucial to the garden’s longevity: Henry Shaw’s vision. From the beginning, the botanical garden was as much about ideals as it was about displaying plants from around the world. Those ideals—public education, social improvement, and scientific research—took root in Shaw’s imagination long before he began creating the garden near his home on the outskirts of St. Louis. His private garden surrounding Tower Grove, as he named the Italianate country house he built about 1849–50, tested many of the principles he applied in the great public botanical garden he began planting a few years later. Although Shaw’s early garden no longer survives, some features, such as a maze, a rose garden, and an elaborate star-shaped perennial bed with a statue of Juno, have been re-created on the grounds surrounding Tower Grove House. The building, now a museum, stands almost in the center of the Missouri Botanical Garden, symbolically balancing the garden’s educational, historical, and scientific missions. The house (restored in 2005) features new exhibits that allow visitors “to enter the Shaw era and visually understand how the house connects to the botanical garden,” explains Dr. Luther Williams, Tower Grove House’s William T. Kemper Director of Education and Interpretation. That connection, he says, is intellectual as well as proximal. “We are displaying original documents that reveal how extensively he consulted with experts from England and from Harvard in planning the botanical garden. We want the displays to convey how an extremely visionary person was able to do the practical day-to-day activities to make a product. How does one actually shape a vision, see it evolve incrementally, and design and redesign a garden?” As the new exhibits reveal, the garden that Shaw built between 1853 and 1859 relied on extensive botanical, horticultural, and design research—his own and that of others. After much thought and consultation about how to display the plantings, Shaw chose the gardenesque treatment championed by the British horticulturist and landscape designer John Claudius Loudon. The gardenesque method, writes Carol Grove in the LALH book Henry Shaw’s Victorian Landscapes, “dictated that plants, shrubs, and trees be treated individually, as specimens.” It was a spare aesthetic, which, paired with bright Victorian floral beds, might shock today’s sensibilities. But the public of Shaw’s era overwhelmingly approved. On opening day, visitors thronged through the classical gates to ramble Shaw’s creation. A sunken parterre, whimsical pavilions, brilliant beds, and plant houses were among the eye-catching features in the garden’s three divisions. Though the garden now spreads over seventy-nine acres (it originally occupied only forty-five), few of the plantings remain. The grove of trees in front of Shaw’s house, planted by him more than a hundred fifty years ago, have now grown to towering heights. A few ancient remnants of the Osage orange allée that once lined his private approach to the garden also survive. Shortly after Shaw’s death in 1889, the Victorian scheme was supplanted by a more fashionable, Olmstedian landscape, which grew to slow maturity. Like many public landscapes, the garden struggled with maintenance issues that worsened during the urban funding crisis that hit the U.S. in the late twentieth century. Elements of this design were recovered in the 1970s and 1980s, and the garden was recognized as a National Historic Landmark in 1989. The lush grounds now support the wide-ranging collection of plants befitting one of the world’s leading botanical research institutions. Today the Missouri Botanical Garden maintains the world’s largest botanical database, and a staff of PhD researchers helps to protect and manage global biodiversity. The garden’s director, Dr. Peter Raven, whose botanical achievements are well known, views these programs as part of Shaw’s legacy, too. “Mr. Shaw began to think of his creation as not simply a garden, but as a botanical garden, where the knowledge of plants would be increased and spread throughout the world,” Raven writes in the foreword to Grove’s monograph. “Carol Grove has shed important new light on the influences that affected Henry Shaw in his planning for his botanical garden.” Grove says she hopes her new book will help visitors and others to understand why designed landscapes look the way they do. “History helps us make sense of what’s going on around us today,” she says. “It’s fascinating to observe the shifting taste in garden design from Shaw’s day to the present, and to recognize the ideas that continue to shape and inform public taste.” (See related article.) —Jane Roy Brown Photographs: |
