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One day in the spring of 1819, 18-year-old Henry Shaw, an Englishman recently landed in the river town of St. Louis on the edge of the American wilderness, took a half-day journey on horseback out of town. Riding westward through marshy ground, past sinkholes and Native American burial mounds, he came at last to a narrow path cutting through brush, and found himself on elevated ground overlooking a prairie. “Uncultivated,” he recorded, “without trees or fences, but covered with tall luxuriant grass, undulated by the gentle breeze of spring.”
If ever a man loved a piece of ground, it was Shaw. As Shaw’s fortunes grew, he resolved to return something to his adopted city, and 40 years after his arrival in St. Louis, he opened on the land he so loved a botanical garden for the city’s residents. This garden is today the Missouri Botanical Garden. One of the oldest botanical gardens in the U.S.
The Missouri Botanical Garden opened to the public in 1859 and began to grow in the European tradition of horticultural display combined with education and the search for new knowledge. Today, 158 years after opening, the Missouri Botanical Garden is a National Historic Landmark and a center for science and conservation, education and horticultural display.
The "Climatron" was built in Oct of 1960.