MOBOT’s New Visitor Center Opens Next Month
Date Posted: July 26, 2022
Posted In: News,
From St. Louis Magazine: 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.
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.