Rendering courtesy of Missouri Botanical Garden
It’s about two months from the opening of the Missouri Botanical Garden’s Jack C. Taylor Visitor Center, and even though construction is ongoing, you can see the shape of things to come. MOBOT wanted to immerse visitors in the garden immediately, so when guests enter the lobby, a design on the soaring glass windows will mimic a sun-dappled woodland area. A large video screen will educate visitors about the conservation work the botanical garden does around the world. A fully climate-controlled Emerson Conservatory will showcase Mediterranean plants. The new gift shop includes an outdoor plant nursery on the patio. And the updated Sassafras café and restaurant will feature a custom communal table and bench by David Stine, who crafted them from a Shumard oak tree near the end of its life. Even the terrazzo floors are on theme. They’re imprinted with brass leaf shapes.
But as much as the new visitor building is a centerpiece, it’s underpinned by a lesser-known addition to MOBOT, a mile south of the garden, on Bent Avenue. There are no fancy floors or video projections there. Just rocks and dust and water. But what’s growing is crucial to both the expanded offerings at MOBOT and global conservation.
That space is the Oertli Family Hardy Plant Nursery, 6.5 acres donated by Charles and Sue Oertli, owners of Guarantee Electrical Co. Another generous supporter from now-closed Ahner’s Nursery gifted the garden a state-of-the-art Dutch-engineered greenhouse. (One room is called the Dutch Disco, a nod to its groovy pink and blue grow lights.) Now, MOBOT is using this space to grow endangered plants to conserve and to display at the garden, to propagate difficult species, and to bank seeds that are threatened in the wild. It will store them in a tornado-proof, earthquake-proof, virtually indestructible vault with a goal of banking 100 percent of the state’s plant species found in the garden.
Rendering courtesy of Missouri Botanical Garden
Most of the 30,500 plants that will be placed in the garden beds around the new visitor center are being nurtured at the Hardy Plant Nursery. Without the room to grow, MOBOT would not have been able to include so many diverse selections—it’s hard to buy rare plants from suppliers.
Landscape architects look at gardens in terms of their connection to the physical environment. MOBOT’s horticulturists are concerned with aesthetics, too, but “the living collection is more than a window into the garden’s mission,” says Andrew Wyatt, MOBOT’s senior vice president for horticulture and living collections. “It is actually the mission happening. That’s why it’s really important to pick species carefully.” And those are complex decisions. Out of the 332 species that will make up the new garden beds, 30 percent of them are species of conservation concern, a term that means there are doubts about a plant’s ability to remain in nature. MOBOT horticulturists might need to find, for example, a plant from the Caucasus, of conservation concern, from a particular population, that represents certain genetics. And it needs to be blue. “This is not your grandma’s garden,” Wyatt says.
Perhaps no plant illustrates that better than Nesocodon mauritianus, one of the rarest in the garden’s collection. Wyatt plucks one of its pale blue flowers and whips it across his left palm. The flower leaves behind a trail of vibrant orange nectar. Nesocodon mauritianus is one of the only known plants pollinated by a gecko, and nearly all of them grow on a 500-foot waterfall on the island of Mauritius. In 2020, MOBOT used a drone to photograph the face of the waterfall and turned the images into a model. They’ll use that when they return to Mauritius to rappel down the falls and collect the plant. Who gets that fun job?
“That might be one of us,” Wyatt says with a laugh.
The Jack C. Taylor Visitor Center opens August 27. Visit missouribotanicalgarden.org for more information.
More to Know
Green Scene
MOBOT’s Jack C. Taylor Visitor Center isn’t just beautiful to look at. It’s also designed with the planet in mind. Here are a few of its sustainable features.
First up: the building’s facade. The exterior’s limestone and granite are sourced from a quarry in Ste. Genevieve. MOBOT selected rock, sand, and cement from local sites to reduce travel and emissions.
The visitor center’s rooftop solar panels will cut down on carbon emissions. Annually, the building will save the output needed to power about 33 homes.
With MOBOT adding 30,500 plants, it needed to consider how it would water them. Solution: It built a 50,000-gallon stormwater collection system into the landscape that will help water the thirsty newcomers.
The visitor center also includes low-flow water fixtures that reduce the demand for potable water.
Good news for electric vehicle drivers: You can charge your car at MOBOT. The garden has added even more charging stations as part of the visitor center update.
Print is dead—at least at the garden. MOBOT is incorporating more digital options for things like displays and ticketing to reduce its reliance on printed materials.
Correction: This story has been updated to reflect the nursery's location on Bent Avenue.
