ST. LOUIS — Eight beds in front and nearly 20 beds just inside of the MoBot visitor center were full of nothing but soil at its grand opening two years ago.
Today, they are bursting with 257 unique kinds of plants, many you won’t see anywhere else. One out of every five of them is considered rare in the wild, including some native to Missouri.
“It’s a different sort of garden than we’ve had in the past, where it might have been all tulips or all peonies,†said Matthew Lobdell, landscape and living collections cultivation director at the Missouri Botanical Garden. “What we’re trying to do here is utilize the space we have to grow as many plants as possible.â€
Lobdell can walk through the gardens and point out several of these rare plants, like a Magnolia ashei native to Florida, two types of blight-resistant chestnut trees and two rare relatives of a Missouri native, witch-hazel.
People are also reading…
“A lot of what I’ve pointed out, you won’t see anywhere else in the region except here at the gardens,†he said.
These flowerbeds are curated by the horticultural conservation team that looks at how plants of “conservation concern†— those that are becoming harder to find growing in their native habitats — can be used in landscaping in Missouri.
Many of the plants in the new flowerbeds are not normally cultivated, according to Becky Sucher, senior manager of living collections at MoBot. This means a lot of the horticulturalists’ jobs are trying lots of different growing conditions for these rare plants, and carefully documenting what works and what doesn’t.
“We are learning how to best grow them in our climate conditions in ºüÀêÊÓƵ ... each with different needs (temp, water, soil, etc.), it can be challenging,†Sucher said in an email.
The plan was always to fill these flowerbeds. However, getting plants in the ground in time for the new visitor center opening in August 2022 wouldn’t have set them up for success, according to Catherine Martin, senior public information officer for the gardens.
“We had to wait a bit to start planting since the building opened in the August heat,†she said. “The bulk of the planting was done in 2023, when our horticulture team planted 31,500 plants in those beds.â€
Those 31,500 plants belonged to 257 taxa, or types of plants. Some 19% of them are considered rare, or hard to find in the wild.
Even under the care of experts, not all the plants originally put in these beds survived. But, according to Lobdell, the plants that don’t make it are just as important as those that do.
“If one of them dies, I’d say it’s part of the experiment,†he said. “You can learn as much from a plant that fails in your collection as you can from one that’s still alive.â€
As horticulturalists at MoBot learn to care for these plants, they share that knowledge to help global conservation efforts and rebuild populations of rare plants.
“A lot of conservation projects fail because the method of conservation is just throwing seeds,†Lobdell said. “We’ll collect seeds from a plant, throw them around that plant and hope they do well. But really what we can do here is try a few different protocols on them and see what works best.â€
The visitor center landscaping project was no small feat. Andrew Wyatt, senior vice president for horticulture and living collections at the gardens, estimates that to plant these new beds alone took at least 2,500 hours of concentrated staff time over a six-week period in 2023.
And the project is ongoing, according to Lobdell. He pointed to two beds waiting to be refilled after the species originally planted there failed to thrive.
“We’re never really done when we work with horticultural collections, because we’re dealing with living plants,†he said.