The Gardens
The Garden is a place for many annual cultural festivals, including the Japanese Festival and the Chinese Culture Days by the St. Louis Chinese Culture Days Committee. During this time, there are showcases of the culture's botanics as well as cultural arts, crafts, music and food. The Japanese Festival recently began to include sumo wrestling, adding this sport to taiko drumming and kimono fashion shows. The Garden is known for its bonsai growing, which can be seen all year round, but is highlighted during the multiple Asian festivals.
Major garden features include:
- Tower Grove House (1849) and Herb Garden - Shaw's Victorian country house designed by prominent local architect George I. Barnett in the Italianate style.
- Victory of Science Over Ignorance - Marble statue by Carlo Nicoli; a copy of the original (1859) by Vincenzo Consani in the Pitti Palace, Florence.
- Linnean House (1882) - Said to be the oldest continually operated greenhouse west of the Mississippi River. Originally Shaw's orangery, in the late 1930s it was converted to house mostly camellias.
- Gladney Rose Garden (1915) - Circular rose garden with arbors.
- Climatron (1960) and Reflecting Pools - the world's first geodesic dome greenhouse designed by architect and engineer Thomas C. Howard of Synergetics, Inc; lowland rain forest with approximately 1500 plants.
- English Woodland Garden (1976) - aconite, azaleas, bluebells, dogwoods, hosta, trillium, and others beneath the tree canopy.
- Seiwa-en Japanese Garden (1977) - is a 14-acre (5.7 ha) chisen kaiyu-shiki (wet strolling garden) with lawns and path set around a 4-acre (1.6 ha) central lake. It was designed by Koichi Kawana and is the largest Japanese Garden in North America.
- Grigg Nanjing Friendship Chinese Garden (1995) - Designed by architect Yong Pan; major features were gifts from sister city Nanjing, and include a moon gate, lotus gate, pavilion, and Chinese scholar's rocks from Tai Hu.
- Blanke Boxwood Garden (1996) - walled parterre with a fine boxwood collection.
- Strassenfest German Garden (2000) - flora native to Germany and Central Europe; bust of botanist and Henry Shaw's scientific advisor George Engelmann (sculpted by Paul Granlund)
- Biblical garden featuring Date palm, pomegranate, fig and olive trees, caper, mint, citron and other plants mentioned in the Bible.
- Ottoman garden with water features and xeriscape.
Read more about this topic: Missouri Botanical Garden
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