OCTOBER 2006 » book review

Victorian Landscapes

Henry Shaw's Victorian Landscapes: The Missouri Botanical Garden And Tower Grove Park
by Carol Grove
University of Massachusetts Press; Amherst, MA; 2005
250 pp.; hardcover; 150 b&w illus.; $39.95
ISBN 1-55849-508-8

Reviewed by Nicole V. Gagné

When 17-year-old Henry Shaw left his native England in 1818, he was turning his back on a childhood of indifferent schooling and unstable family finances; in fact, his father Joseph accompanied him on the boat to Quebec in order to escape his creditors. Joseph continued to be as inept a provider in North America as he'd been in Sheffield, and Henry soon split from his father and traveled as far south as New Orleans before settling in St. Louis, MO, in 1819. It was an era of rapid advancement for the developing city, and Henry's success there was meteoric. By the time he became a naturalized U.S. citizen in 1843, he had amassed a huge fortune from years spent trading in regional goods, importing quality items from England, and shrewdly investing in local real estate.

A retired man of leisure by the age of 40, Shaw traveled extensively through Europe and Asia Minor throughout most of the 1840s, and indulged his special fascination with gardening, collecting books on the subject and visiting an array of gardens and parks. In 1849, he commissioned the construction of both a townhouse and country villa in St. Louis – his wanderlust had been sated, but his fascination for plants and landscaping was about to take off. That fascination would become an incalculable boon, for St. Louis and indeed the entire nation, as Henry spent the remainder of his life creating the city's spectacular Missouri Botanical Garden and its restful Tower Grove Park.

Shaw's botanical ambitions quickly outstripped the garden and landscape potential of the grounds of his Italianate villa, Tower Grove House. A final visit to England in 1851, where he scrutinized the Great Exhibition's majestic Crystal Palace, confirmed his desire to create an innovative botanical garden in St. Louis. He poured all his energies into the undertaking after his return to the States, and drew upon expert input from such master botanists as England's William Jackson Hooker and the Americans Asa Gray and George Engelmann.

The result was a worthy rival to the Royal Botanic Gardens at Kew and the New York Botanical Garden. Indeed, ever since its inauguration in 1859, the 45-acre Missouri Botanical Garden has been widely regarded as one of the finest botanical institutions in the world, and today remains an epicenter for botanical study and research. The nearly 300-acre Tower Grove Park, situated a short distance from the Missouri Botanical Garden, has been less celebrated than its neighbor, but it became a beloved and indispensable aspect of St. Louis life immediately upon its opening in 1872. Shaw intended that both facilities should elevate urban life in St. Louis and made them available free of charge to everyone. His death in 1889 prompted a period of mourning throughout the entire city.

Art historian and landscape-studies expert Carol Grove has written a fascinating and informative account of the histories of these two urban landmarks. At the same time, Henry Shaw's Victorian Landscapes provides a spirited look at the life of a true Victorian visionary and gives an insightful sense of the tone of American life in the 19th century. Her book is also commendable for its thoughtful consideration of the longstanding debate in landscaping between the gardenesque and the picturesque. Grove sums up the argument with a quotation from John Claudius Loudon's 1850 Encyclopedia Of Gardening: "[T]he picturesque style [is known] by that irregularity in forms, lines, and general composition, which we see in natural landscape, while in the gardenesque style all the trees, shrubs, and plants are planted and managed in such a way that each may arrive at its highest state of individual perfection, and display its beauties to as great advantage as if it were cultivated to that purpose alone, while, at the same time, the plants relatively to one another, and to the whole scene or place to which they belong, are placed regularly and systematically."

If that definition betrays a personal sympathy for the gardenesque over the picturesque, Loudon was certainly not alone in his taste. He was a strong influence on Shaw's fervent enthusiasm for the gardenesque approach, and when Shaw designed both the Garden and the Park, he deliberately sought to further the education and moral uplift of the public. Nevertheless, his decision to situate flora so as to provide a more explicit instruction for visitors wound up placing him in opposition to such master landscapers of his time as Frederick Law Olmsted, Calvert Vaux and A.J. Downing – with Olmsted sniffing that Shaw's gardenesque design of the Missouri Botanical Garden had resulted in a "dwarfish and paltry affair."

To a degree, history has sided with the designer of New York's picturesque Central Park: both the Missouri Botanical Garden and Tower Grove Park underwent significant redesigning in the early-20th century, with several of Shaw's didactic arrangements reorganized into a more natural and pastoral approach, in keeping with the tastes of the era. One likes to think that Shaw would have rolled with these punches: "Arboriculture and park keeping can never stand still," he wrote in 1878, insisting that the goal should be "to plant and sow, that we or our successors may reap and gather."

Grove's book complements her detailed text with an array of wonderful period illustrations and photographs: who can resist the sight of Tower Grove Park Superintendent James Gurney standing proudly on one of the massive floating Victoria lily pads that he specialized in cultivating? There are also numerous handsome contemporary photos by Carol Betsch of sights in both the Missouri Botanical Garden and Tower Grove Park.

Yet Henry Shaw's Victorian Landscapes must be accounted something of a disappointment due to its complete absence of color photography. The editorial decision to document these sites strictly in black and white comes off as an exercise in sheer perversity; whatever the financial constraints of these economically unstable times, which may have inhibited the book's co-publishers (the University of Massachusetts Press and the Library of American Landscape History), this refusal to include even one slim folio of color plates drastically undercuts the book's ability to represent and celebrate either the garden or the park. Let us hope that a subsequent edition will repair this lamentable error. TB

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