Since 1977, the Garden has proudly hosted the Japanese Festival, which now attracts around 50,000 people each Labor Day Weekend. It is widely considered one of the largest and oldest festivals of its kind in the United States.

    The festival results from prolific collaboration between the Missouri Botanical Garden and several Japanese-American organizations in St. Louis. This fruitful partnership provides an authentic experience highlighting Japanese music, art, dance, food and entertainment throughout the Garden.

  Natasha Merchant-Pappu has lived all over the world. She is comfortable in Massachusetts and Connecticut, London, Bombay and Poona in India. But there is probably no place where she is more at home than in her Ladue garden. 

When Patrick Barrett built his striking, hilltop home in Des Peres 15 years ago, he loved everything about it. The gorgeous stone architecture had a timeless European appeal. The views of the surrounding countryside were spectacular. There was one thing, however, he hated. The ugly 15-to-20-foot retaining wall that was designed to re-enforce the hillside to install a swimming pool just outside the home’s walkout lower level. Not only was it unattractive, as the father of five active children, he viewed the drop off as dangerous.

It is hard for Brian Davies to remember a time when he wasn’t tending a garden. Growing up in north St. Louis County, he happily took over his parent’s garden. When he bought a home in University City, most of the yard became a garden. Six years ago, he and his wife, Jennifer, moved to the Central West End, where he is again making gardening magic.

     Jesse Gilbertson first discovered the concept of bonsai during a landscape design class at the University of Missouri. “One of our projects involved a table full of small trees, a table full of decorative pots and piles of rocks. We had to take a tree and match it with a pot and match it with some rocks,” he explains.

Where to find them: Emerson Conservatory

During the cold winter months, the Orchid Show transforms the Emerson Conservatory into a beautiful display of the Garden’s extensive tropical orchid collection. This collection boasts over 5,000 individual plants and 700 unique species, of which nearly one in ten are threatened or endangered.