Missouri Botanical Garden (Images of America: St. Louis)

Interesting reading.

As a twice-annual visitor to friends living in St. Louis, I make sure we get to visit the Missouri Botanical Gardens (MOBOT) every chance we get. The gardens are magnificent and I highly recommend visiting in spring when the azaleas and cherry trees are in glorious blossom. But I knew little about the garden's history, other than that it had been started by wealthy businessman Henry Shaw in the 19th century, and that he had lived in the house that still stands in the garden.This well-written overview of the garden's history describes the influences on Shaw in the mid-19th century that inspired him to plan and execute a large public garden. But it is the numerous black and white photographs and captions that really tell the story from the early days of Victorian-style gardens surrounded by miles of prairie, through the changes after Shaw's death in 1889, the major additions and renovations just before the First World War, the challenges of low visitor counts and aging facilities in the 1950s, the Renaissance that began with the construction of the geodesic indoor Climatron in 1959, the major project of the Japanese Garden in the early 1970s and the flurry of lovely new gardens in the 1990s.I had no idea that the garden had gone through such changes over the 150 years of its existence -- pretty much everything except the location of Shaw's house, his mausoleum and the Linnean House have completely changed since the garden's beginning, and many garden areas from the early 20th century have been totally swept away. It was somewhat difficult to keep track of the locations in the photos compared to what is in those areas today, and a modern map of the garden would have helped. But I simply went to the MOBOT website and printed out a copy of their map, which greatly aided visualizing the locations of historical garden areas.I unreservedly recommend this well-illustrated "story of a garden" to anyone who regularly visits the MOBOT or to readers interested in garden history or St. Louis history.

The book explains history I never knew about St Louis and our world class gardens.

Having visited the wonderful Missouri Botanical Gardens a couple of times and read Henry Shaw's biography I was curious to see more old pictures of its development. A good selection of photos showing this and an introduction with brief account of Shaw's life. A good memory book.