Shaw's Garden

Hidden in a residential neighborhood a short drive from downtown, the world-class Missouri Botanical Garden exists because of the generosity of one of St. Louis’s best-loved citizens, Henry Shaw. Retired before forty after amassing a fortune selling hardware, he invested heavily in land on the city’s outskirts. By the time of his death in 1889, his philanthropic works included: a public school building; land for a city hospital; endowment of Washington University’s School of Botany; the Missouri Historical Society; and development of Tower Grove Park, the city’s second largest.

Shaw’s most enduring legacy to St. Louis is the botanical garden he established at his country estate. In 1859, in an act of largesse that seems impossible today, he opened his private gardens to the public during his lifetime and while he was still living on his estate. During the last three decades of Shaw's life, ordinary citizens shared the garden’s beauty and rubbed elbows with perhaps the richest man in the city. Early on, Shaw himself created the name still used today: Missouri Botanical Garden. But talk to natives and long time St. Louis residents  and you more likely hear the name in vogue for 150 years: “Shaw’s Garden”.

This beautiful and ever-changing urban woodland contains almost 80 acres of horticultural displays. The grounds immediately around Shaw’s Tower Grove House showcase formal Victorian gardening, including the prerequisite living maze. Just down from the house visitors encounter the English Woodland Gardens, resplendent in spring with blooming rhododendrons, azaleas, and dogwoods. Next, Seiwa-en Japanese Gardens is a carefully crafted world featuring waterfalls, beaches, and islands, surrounding a four-acre lake. 

Henry Shaw’s architect was George I. Barnett, designer of the Old Courthouse in downtown St. Louis and the Missouri Governor’s Mansion in Jefferson City. On the garden’s grounds, Barnett’s works include the Tower Grove House, Shaw’s beautiful mausoleums, the Museum Building, and the Linnean House – reputedly the oldest public greenhouse in continuous operation west of the Mississippi. All of these buildings were constructed during Shaw’s life, as were the stone walls that surround the garden, and the old main gatehouse, now the Spink Pavilion.

Of the garden’s modern buildings, the centerpiece is the Climatron, one of Buckminster Fuller’s early geodesic domes, designed by T. C. Howard, of Synergetics, Inc., and executed by the architects Murphy and Mackey. Opened in 1960, the Climatron features a free-span diameter of 175 feet, and rises 70 feet to its apex. The building is the first completely climate controlled greenhouse, allowing a wide range of climatic conditions within the more than one half-acre of enclosed space. An interesting side note – one of the Climatron’s cycad plants, Dioon edule, a primitive ancestor of pines, is the actual specimen that was exhibited at 1904 World’s Fair.

Today’s garden visitor, admiring the abundant beauty, might be surprised to learn that Missouri Botanical Garden is not just a pretty face. As a world leader in botanical conservation and research, the garden employs dozens of scientists behind the scenes at its facilities in Missouri, as well as at remote sites throughout the world. The garden today is a fitting legacy to Henry Shaw, a man passionate about botany, appreciative of beauty, and determined to share his creations in perpetuity with the citizens of his adopted city, and the world.

Getting there from CONSTRUCT 2015:

Driving: 15 minutes (without traffic). Follow Eighth Street south past Busch Stadium (it becomes Seventh Street) and continue until you see the entrance ramp for Highway I-44/I-55. Take I-44 west to Vandeventer (Exit 287). Turn left on Vandeventer, then left on Shaw. The Garden parking entrance will be on your right. Parking available on surface lots.

Taxi: Budget $15 each way.