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Young Henry Shaw, only 18, was selling cutlery out of a rented room in St. Louis when a chance, half-day journey out of town on horseback one spring day in 1819 led him to his destiny - the prairie that would become his garden. "Uncultivated," the Englishman recorded, "without trees or fences, but covered with tall luxuriant grass, undulated by the gentle breeze of spring." Forty years later, in 1859, the wealthy former businessman-turned-philanthropist opened on the land he so loved a botanical garden for his adopted city's residents. The treasure Shaw established "for all time for public good" on June 15, 1859, would become the Missouri Botanical Garden, an urban oasis of splendor and beauty, and one of the nation's oldest botanical gardens in continuous operation. |
