Missouri Botanical Garden

Henry Shaw, a British immigrant who reached St. Louis in 1819, began building a garden on his country estate in the 1850s and opened it to the public in 1859, which is why St. Louisans still call it Shaw's Garden. His Italianate country house of 1849, Tower Grove House, designed by George I. Barnett, stands on the grounds. Shaw died in 1889, and his will left the garden to a board of trustees to keep it going.

Shaw also held people in slavery. In 1855 a woman named Esther and her three children, enslaved by Shaw, were among the people who tried to cross the Mississippi with the help of Mary Meachum, and they were captured on the Illinois side. In 2024 Tower Grove House was added to the National Park Service's Underground Railroad Network to Freedom.

The Climatron replaced the old Palm House in 1960. Designed by the St. Louis architects Murphy and Mackey on R. Buckminster Fuller's geodesic principles, it stands 70 feet high and 175 feet across with no interior columns, its weight carried to the ground on five piers. A 22-month renovation from 1988 built a new dome of 2,425 glass panes just inside the original aluminum frame, which was kept, so the building is now a dome within a dome. Seiwa-en, the Japanese garden designed by Koichi Kawana around a four-acre lake, opened in 1977. The garden became a National Historic Landmark in 1976.