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You’ll want to have goth music ready to go on the iPod before hitting the Missouri Botanical Garden in grayest winter.
The feast of denuded, gnarled trees; dry fountain basins; cold concrete sculptures; bushes pruned for the season of waiting; and other spectral visuals may transport you to a beautiful and haunted place as you hike down cold paths.
If you hurry you can have a day like yesterday, when a stiff wind whipped through the trees and snow flurries blew wildly in kamikaze trails, melting as they hit the ground.
You can see and hear:
- Sleeping gardens with wilted lettuces and clumps of old snow
- Wind chimes clanging inharmoniously, like a town bell rattled for a hanging in the Old West
- Bulbs poking through topsoil like premature babies
- Wind rippling green water in ponds, sending dead leaves into a trembling mass at one end
- Thousands of little black placards sprouting from the ground to identify plants that are browned like kitchen failures – or not even there
- Statues made funerary by the season; especially the limestone and glass dome enclosing the ghostly, 1887 “Victory of Science Over Ignorance”
- A tree’s huge, heavy branch bending down to touch the ground like some hideous anthropomorphism, or a hungry tree-god beckoning the foolish to come closer
- Long, empty beds for rose bushes
- Pines and firs quaking in the wind
- Ageless rock gardens, manicured to facilitate your existential ponderings
- Arrogant-bastard geese winging overhead, pooping endlessly, honking, honking, honking
- Gnarled tree roots exposed above the earth like the backs of the hands of the very old
View these things vicariously via the slideshow below, or visit the Missouri Botantical Garden (4344 Shaw), which is open daily 9 a.m. to 5 p.m. Admission is $8 for visitors 13 and up, $4 for St. Louis residents, and free to members. St. Louis residents can also visit free on Wednesday and Saturday before noon. For more information on the grounds, classes, special exhibits and more, go to missouribotanicalgarden.org.
Photographs by Byron Kerman
