Missouri Botanical Garden

The Missouri Botanical Garden began, not as an adornment to an estate, but as a public botanical garden. Within the walls of these 73 acres, magnificent gardens and rare collections of botanical, horticultural, and historical components reside with architecturally significant buildings and inspirational fountains and statuary. Founder Henry Shaw endowed his institution not only with summit standards for specimen collection and research, but also with his personal vision of a garden as a boon beyond science - to awaken the human spirit to a joyous experiencing of nature. Today Missouri Botanical Garden is "one of the top three" botanical gardens in the world, renowned for research, education and display.

The Garden consists of a series of "rooms," each with its own special role in the overall design. The separate gardens reflect periods of history and evolving theories of garden design. Missouri Botanical Garden is a historic landmark, an oasis in the middle of the city. The Garden features tradition such as winter time camellias in the Linnean House, the annual Orchid Exhibit each February and the Japanese Festival each Memorial Day weekend. Springtime transforms the Azalea/Rhododendron Garden into masses of mauve, white, yellow, purple and red blooms. Summer brings aromatic pleasure to visitors of the Scented Garden. The English Woodland Garden lights up in spring with dogwoods, bluebells and azalea blossoms, in summer hostas are abundant, in autumn, fall foliage is displayed. Throughout the year the Climatron houses plants from afar in a tropical setting, pools and waterfalls give a sense of visiting a true tropical rainforest. The Garden's 73 acres embrace cultures of old and new, near and far in each of its "rooms."

Seiwa-En, an authentic Japanese garden gently soothes visitors with its time-honored spirit and beauty. Seiwa-En's fourteen acres makes it the largest strolling Japanese Garden in North America. Japanese gardens incorporate natural elements of water, rocks and trees as symbolic versions of nature. Stone lanterns, rocks positioned with delicate care in the lake, walkways, teahouse and water contribute to the serene garden, Seiwa-En, "garden of pure, clear harmony and peace."

The Margaret Grigg Nanjing Friendship Garden is considered the most authentic "scholar's garden" of its size in the United States. A show place of extraordinary craftsmanship, a retreat to the traditional Chinese garden pleases visitors with graceful architectural elements including a pavilion of traditional black, white and gray and a hand carved white marble bridge with a narrow mountain stream that cascades over several small falls, feeding into the central pool at the heart of the garden. The Chinese garden is inscribed with poetry and accented with carefully chosen traditional plantings: Pines, bamboos, willows, plum trees, forsythia, hibiscus, wisteria, peonies, lotuses, rhododendrons, azaleas, camellias, gardenias, citrus, bonsai and cymbidium orchids. Many of these plants originated in China, which has the world's largest temperate flora. The Margaret Grigg Nanjing Friendship Garden's respectful beauty honors the fifteenth anniversary of the sister city relationship between Nanjing, China, and St. Louis, Missouri, and the longstanding scientific and cultural exchanges between the Garden and Chinese botanical institutions.

Interest in the magnificent gardens on display often leads visitors to seek more horticultural information through the Garden's educational programs. Officially opening May 1997 is the Kemper Center for Home Gardening. Kemper Center is 8.5 acres of the Garden grounds developed to give amateur home gardeners ideas and ability to create their own paradise. Kemper Center for Home Gardening contains twenty-three distinct residential scale gardens. The 8,000 square foot pavilion contains a reference library, demonstration potting room, greenhouse and a plant clinic. Seek advice for your individual gardening problems with Kemper PlantBase, Nursery Tracker and Pest Selector Computer Programs. Adult education classes begin spring and summer: Learn to bake homemade bread, prepare ethnic cuisine, plan and design residential landscapes, create floral arrangements, discover nature study and an inviting natural history travel program.

The Missouri Botanical Garden operates the world's most active research program in tropical botany. Scientific research at the Garden focuses on exploration of the tropics, which encompass the earth's least known, most diverse, and most rapidly vanishing ecosystems. Because of the speed with which irreversible changes are occurring in tropical regions, the Garden has made a long-term commitment and assumed a leadership role in the study and conservation of these imperiled habitats.

For further information, please take a look at our Web site.

-- Keven Ficken, Research Division, Missouri Botanical Garden

The Gardens of the World column is sponsored by the Seed Guild, providers of unusual and rare seeds.

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