Henry Shaw

Henry Shaw (Sheffield, England July 24, 1800 - St. Louis August 25, 1889) prominent man of his time, philanthropist, lover of botany and founder of the Missouri Botanical Garden.

Biography

Henry Shaw was born in 1800 in Sheffield, an industrial city in England. On May 3, 1819 when he was eighteen years old he moved to St. Louis with the intention of importing goods from St. Louis across the Mississippi and Missouri rivers.

Two decades of financial success in St. Louis allowed him to abandon business operations and dedicate himself to more refined pursuits.

In 1840 he began a period of almost ten years of travel, during which he visited museums and botanical gardens in Europe, Asia Minor, and Russia. He also visited Chatsworth, in Derbyshire, England, where he saw the Joseph Paxton Arboretum and the Duke of Devonshire's classified collection of plants from around the world. With these visits he matured the idea of creating a similar cultural enterprise in St. Louis, his adopted home.

In the following three decades, Henry Shaw gave shape to his dreams, of creating a place of beauty and distinction that would serve to educate and improve American citizens. For which he was transforming his 'Tower Grove' estate into one of the nation's leading botanical gardens.

At first, he was arranging thousands of plants, distributing them with garden criteria, according to the three major divisions of "J. C. Loudon": garden, arboretum, and fruticetum. He also decorated it with gazebos, flower beds, and herbaceous soils of scientifically selected plants. Henry Shaw consulted regularly with William Jackson Hooker, the director of the Royal Botanic Gardens at Kew, and also had Harvard botanist Asa Gray as an advisor on the establishment of research infrastructure for scientists. St. Louis physician and botanist George Engelmann, the nation's foremost authority on American cacti, was his most influential advisor.

The "Shaw’s Garden" (now the Missouri Botanical Garden) opened to the public in 1859 to enthusiastic legions of visitors eager to see one of the country's first botanical institutions. In the following thirty years, Henry Shaw increased the plantations, with new species of plants that were discovered by the great plant seekers of his time.

In 1867 Henry Shaw began to work intensively to prepare Tower Grove Park, a strip of 112 hectares of land attached to the southern part of the botanical garden. Despite the growing popularity of garden landscape designer Frederick Law Olmsted and his pastoral style, Henry Shaw again chose garden design where emphasis was placed on plants as specimens, in keeping with the educational vision of it. He carefully distributed the trees according to their height levels, ornamenting the landscape with exotic plants, oriental-style pavilions and summer houses.

Henry Shaw left Tower Grove Park as a legacy to the city of Saint Louis. He wrote botanical treatises, equipped the School of Botany at the University of Washington, helped found the 'Missouri Historical Society', and donated a school and land to the city for the construction of a hospital.. Of Henry Shaw's gifts, the Missouri Botanical Garden is undoubtedly the best known.

• The abbreviation "H.Shaw" is used to indicate Henry Shaw as authority in the scientific description and classification of vegetables.