Books

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 retire 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 enthusiastic visitors. Over the next thirty years, Shaw expanded the plantings, drawing on species introduced by the era’s great plant hunters. In 1867 he began work on Tower Grove Park on 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 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 Americans. 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.