Guide

A Guide to the Missouri Botanical Garden in St. Louis

First open to the public in 1859, the Missouri Botanical Garden is the oldest botanical garden in continuous operation in the United States and one of the only gardens to achieve National Historic Landmark status. In 2009, we celebrate the Garden's 150th anniversary, or sesquicentennial, with the publication of a series of reprints of historic documents.

 

Gardens and Botanic Gardens

Gardening at the present day is divided into many branches. We have landscape gardening, teaching us hew to lay out our grounds to the best advantage, how to plant out woods and dispose of water, how to build our houses, and make our roads, walks, and fences, so that we may gain the worlds approval. We have vegetable gardening and market gardening, teaching us how an abundant supply of vegetables may be obtained at all seasons of the year. We have flower gardening in many a style and character—Florists Gardens, for sale of flowers, Nursery Gardens for sale of Plants and trees, and Botanic gardening.

It is recorded of the first created of our race, that, to fully enjoy the blessings of life, he was to dress and keep a garden; and his first pursuit was horticulture. The good gardener of those days was not only the first of men, but the most honored of mortals; and while he faithfully followed that ancient occupation, manifested the highest state of civilisation the world has ever seen. He conducted the first operations of that model of a goodly Garden, but when he ceased from his labours therein, happily bequeathed to prosperity, an enduring, and appreciative taste for the gentle art he loved so well. The legacy he left us has found claimants in all civilised communities and countries from that remote age until now.

Gardening as an Art. To adopt the words of Christowell, There is nothing in the world half so beautiful as the gardeners work. What are jewellers, or watchmakers or ivory carvers, or even painters, to compare with a genuine Gardener? The things that they handle are dead and artificial, and cannot know the treatment they receive. But our work is living and natural, and knows us, and adapts itself to follow our desires and pleasures. It has its own tempers, and moods of feeling, the same that we have; for every plant that lives is sensitive.

Botany is that branch of Natural History which relates to the vegetable kingdom, not only the naming and classification of plants, but embracing all the phenomena of vegetable life in their widest extent; of the external forms of plants, and of their anatomical structure however minute; of the functions they perform, of their distribution over the globe at the present, and at former epochs, and of the uses to which they are subservient. 1st examines the plant at its earliest state of development, when it appears as a simple cell, and follows it thro’ all its stages of progress until it attains maturity. It takes a comprehensive view of all the plants which cover the earth, from the minutest lichen or moss, only visible by the aid of the microscope, to the most gigantic production of the tropics.

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