Henry Shaw founded the Missouri Botanical Garden in 1859, and it remains the oldest continuously operating botanical garden in the United States. Shaw was an English-born hardware merchant who came to St. Louis in 1819 at the age of 18, made a fortune supplying tools and cutlery to the city's growing frontier economy, and retired at 40. He spent the rest of his long life — he died in 1889 at age 78 — transforming his personal estate into a public garden and scientific institution.
Shaw was influenced by the great botanical gardens of Europe, particularly Kew Gardens in London, and he brought in one of America's leading botanists, Asa Gray of Harvard, to advise on the garden's collections. The Missouri Botanical Garden today holds over 6.6 million plant specimens in its herbarium — one of the largest in North America — and maintains research programs in plant conservation across more than 30 countries. The garden's Japanese Garden, Seiwa-en, is one of the largest traditional Japanese gardens in the United States, with 14 acres of carefully composed landscapes.
The Victorian glasshouse, the Climatron, is a geodesic dome greenhouse housing a tropical rainforest. Shaw's mansion still stands on the grounds, preserved as it was in the 1880s. The garden is his enduring gift to a city he loved.