The Literary Garden: The Cultivation of Plants and Gardens in Narratives

The Literary Garden: The Cultivation of Plants and Gardens in Narratives is open now at the Stephen and Peter Sachs Museum inside the Missouri Botanical Garden. It's an exhibition that looks at how plants and gardens show up in writing—across herbals, novels, poems, comics, and children's literature—and it pulls a lot of its material from the Garden's own archives.

There's a good mix of old and new on display. You'll find Martha Kerr's herbarium, put together by a woman born around 1825, alongside the Peter H. Raven Library and the Herbarium's bryology exsiccatae. New children's books from MBG Press are also part of the show. The visual side comes from artworks by Dail Chambers, Jodi Harvey, and Jessica Palmer.

It's not just something you look at, either. There's a 360° tour you can take, and perfumers Shawn Maher and Weston Adam have created scents for the exhibition—one inspired by old books and another by wet, mossy gardens. The show also brings in the oral literary tradition of Madagascar, with texts translated by Garden staff working there.

If you're in St. Louis and want to see how the Garden's collections connect to the books we read, it's a good place to start. You can find it at the Stephen and Peter Sachs Museum within the Missouri Botanical Garden.