It’s believed that this massive cabinet once belonged to Henry Shaw. Now it’s filled with potato mashers. Missouri Botanical Garden president Peter Wyse Jackson, an ethnobotanist, collects them. And he’s sure the garden’s founder would understand.
“Each one is a different timber—I’ve found them in Ireland, Europe, the Midwest—and each one tells a story,” Wyse Jackson says, eyes alight. The potato’s larger narrative is the bright and dark history of the Irish people—explosive growth, famine, emigration. But there are smaller, gentler stories here, too: a Scottish thistle butter mold. A child’s rattle made from rushes. A small grass brush Russian Orthodox priests use to flick holy water. A wine stopper made from 5,000-year-old Irish bogwood.
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He crosses the room to straighten a Haitian vodou trance painting that goes crooked weekly. (“I always think somebody doesn’t want me to have it!” ) Haiti was the reason for his first trip to St. Louis; Katherine Dunham wanted him to create a botanical garden at her home in Port-au-Prince. Now, the Missouri Botanical Garden helps develop gardens throughout the island.
A teak dodo bird from Mauritius perches atop Wyse Jackson’s bookshelf. “We have a team of scientists there right now,” he says, adding that Mauritius was his first expedition, when he became interested in plant conservation as a curator in Dublin. “We spent three months trying to rescue species from extinction—which I’ve been trying to do ever since.”
