Nineteenth Century Saint Louis businessman and botanist Henry Shaw must have been a fascinating conversationalist. At 19 he booked passage on a Mississippi River steamship… disembarked at St. Louis… and opened a hardware store selling fine cutlery. By the age of 40 his business, as well as landholdings purchased through the years, provided enough wealth to retire and travel for 11 years.
His interests as an amateur botanist led him to found the world-renowned Missouri Botanical Garden in 1859… and eight years later to donate land for a rectangular 289 acre park to be sited just south of the botanical garden.

Architect James Gurney Sr., previously in charge of aquatic plants at Kew Gardens in London, designed the park and became its first superintendent. It was named Tower Grove Park and it opened 40 years after the Missouri Botanical Garden gates opened for the first time.



Tower Grove Park was designed by Gurney in the "gardenesque" style. I made an interesting search for this word and the garden movement it represented… it was new to me. Advocates of this style prefer the definition on the Gardenesque website. It states, "… the vision for the Gardenesque garden movement was to create more artistic, rich and exotic gardens, accentuating detail rather than vast natural landscapes." A somewhat different definition is offered by The Oxford English Dictionary: "Partaking of the character of a garden; somewhat resembling a garden or what belongs to a garden."

Whatever its definition… its appearance is unique and it is enormously popular. It contains 32 Victorian-era pavilions, a lily pond, a palm house, a bandstand in addition to playing fields, as well as cycle, walking and jogging paths.




The park is also home to over 400 species of trees, bushes and flowering plants. The park and the diversity of its plant collection make the park a major stop-over for migratory birds. Forty percent of American songbirds and waterbirds use this route.