Photograph courtesy of The Missouri Botantical Garden
Thirty-four years after Henry Shaw lay in state, his casket circled by potted palms draped in black velvet, every
tree leaf in the city was velvety with soot. A fog of coal smoke spewed from the city’s chimneys and smokestacks, smothering the sky; mercury fell with the rainwater, and specks of lead and arsenic glittered in the air. The botanical garden’s horticulturists watched as thousands of orchids, in greenhouses, dropped blossoms, their leaves scabbed with brown spots. The panicked trustees sold off 50 acres to pay for a large patch of Ozark borderland in Gray Summit, far from the sooty city. Though the first plan was to transport every fern and succulent there, by 1953, the smoke had cleared. So only the orchids went.
Right around this time, the Arboretum (now Shaw Nature Reserve) opened publicly. A former farm, it harbored large patches of natural woodland, but this wasn’t the era of the prairie burn or native plant. Hardware stores sold bags of DDT pellets. House paint still contained lead. Decades passed before the fields and meadows planted with junipers and daffodils receded to sedges, tall grasses, and boreal forest birds. Though it’s always the staunch bearded guys who end up on stamps, we forget that ladies on the Audubon Society rolls led the charge to stop using feathers in hats—and set up a Rachel Carson Fund to ban DDT. They were mothers not unlike this one: a woman in a slipstream generation who wore flannel and sneakers, along with her chemically set beauty-shop curls.
