Situated between the Lichtenstein Victorian District and the Japanese Garden, visitors step into a shaded patch of tranquility known as the Cherbonnier English Woodland Garden. Beneath a canopy of trees, more than 300 rhododendrons and azaleas and 100 dogwoods burst into bloom each spring, while clusters of wildflowers, hydrangeas and perennials provide surprising splashes of color against the background music of a babbling brook. The garden peaks around the second week of April, when the dogwoods, wildflowers and other spring blooms are out.

Forget Jack and his ethereal, spiraling beanstalk. If you want to see some authentic, fancy, fast-growing plant magic, local garden experts want you to checkout “Green Giant” arborvitae. It is rapidly becoming the “go-to” plant for garden designers and homeowners who want to create an all year, living, green privacy screen.

Leigh Walker confesses to being a gambler. She’s been hooked for over 25 years. Her addiction began in 1990, three years after she and her husband built their West County home. It started with just a few free plants provided by neighbors. The odds of those plants surviving were no safe bet. To illustrate the length of the odds, Leigh spins the tale of two broken pick axes, destroyed simply by trying to get a mailbox post planted in the rocky, clay soil. If the obstacles where that forbidding to a tough metal spike with some manpower behind it, what chance did tender plant roots have?

Built in 1882, the Missouri Botanical Garden’s Linnean House is the oldest continuously operating public greenhouse west of the Mississippi River and is the only remaining greenhouse at the Garden that was built during Henry Shaw’s time. Designed by noted architect George I. Barnett, the Linnean House is named in honor of Carl Linnaeus, the “father of taxonomy,” a Swedish botanist, physician and zoologist who laid the foundation for the modern scheme of binomial nomenclature.