The Missouri Botanical Garden has a long and proud history, but our orchids didn’t always grow here. Back in 1926, the collection was threatened by dirty city air from coal smoke and industrial pollution. So, the Garden moved them 30 miles west, to Gray Summit, Missouri, at what is now the Shaw Nature Reserve. Greenhouses were built there especially for this purpose. The next year, in 1927, an orchid seedling department was started. From the late 1920’s until 1958, the Garden sold cut orchid...

The Garden’s orchid collection has a historic connection with one of St. Louis’s longest standing traditions. The Veiled Prophet Parade is one of the country’s oldest parades. The first one was held in 1878, sponsored by a group of civic leaders who wanted to promote St. Louis commerce. It was modeled on New Orleans’ Mardi Gras celebration. Today, the annual Veiled Prophet Parade in July continues to draw crowds by the thousands. The Garden supplies fresh orchids for the mysterious Veiled...

The Garden offers a number of sources for plant care advice. You can call us on weekday mornings at (314) 577-5143. For fact sheets prepared by the Kemper Center for Home Gardening, go online to www.gardeninghelp.org. Stop by the Kemper Center to use reference materials or ask for guide sheets on growing and caring for orchids. You can also bring a sick plant to our walk-in Plant Doctor for identification and diagnosis services. The Kemper Center also offers classes for both novice and...

The orchid display starts as a concept more than a year before its installation. The show changes themes each year. New props specific to each show are designed and built, and the display is installed by a team of Horticulture staff and volunteers. Each orchid plant here is part of our permanent collection. The variety of orchids you see in this display changes over six weeks. We start with about 800 plants and switch out approximately 50 to 100 plants each week, replacing them with fresh...

Orchids are the largest family of flowering plants in the world, with some 30 to 35,000 species. That’s nearly 10 percent of all flowering plants! They grow on every continent except Antarctica. About 200 orchid species grow in North America. Thousands more grow in tropical countries. More than 3,500 species are found in Ecuador and more than 1,300 in Costa Rica. Some orchid plants are less than an inch tall with flowers the size of a pinhead. Others grow up to 40 feet tall, with flowers...

The creation of the world-class orchid collection at the Missouri Botanical Garden did not occur overnight. It is the culmination of many research trips to the tropics and donations both local and from afar. In 1876, Mrs. Henry T. Blow presented Garden founder, Henry Shaw, with a sampling of orchids collected by her husband while serving as minister to Brazil under President Grant. In 1918, Dr. D.S. Brown, a noted local orchidologist, donated his well-known collection to the Garden as...

The Garden’s orchid collection is one of the largest and finest in the country. We grow more than 8,100 orchid plants behind the scenes, in our greenhouses. They make up our largest living collection, representing over 2,500 unique species, varieties and hybrids. The Garden grows many rare and unusual specimens. Some are over 100 years old. Our collection emphasizes the kinds of orchids that can survive St. Louis’s hot summers. For this display, our Horticulture staff shows you as many...

Orchids are often endangered with extinction in nature. Wild populations are often over collected by humans. Many species are highly adapted to a specific habitat, soil, or pollinator, making them very vulnerable to climate change. All orchids at the Missouri Botanical Garden have been carefully and legally acquired in accordance with CITES (sigh-tease), the Convention on International Trade in Endangered Species. Garden researchers work throughout the world to preserve the ecosystems...