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122 MISSOURI BOTANICAL GARDEN BULLETIN 
Yet you have honored him as Garrick or Siddons have 
never been honored, and he don’t deserve it, sir!’’? ‘‘Prob- 
ably you are quite right, Mr. L———, from a professional 
point of view,’’ replied Mr. Shaw, with his usual smile, ‘‘but 
I am indebted to Mr. DeBar for a great many very pleasant 
hours, and am glad of the opportunity to partially repay 
that debt.’’ It is to his recognition of a much higher order 
of dramatic ability that we owe the Neilson mulberry tree 
in the rear of the Shakespeare statue; marking the spot 
which ‘‘the incomparable Juliet’’ selected on her last visit 
to St. Louis for the slip from the poet’s own mulberry at 
Stratford, which she would have sent had not untimely death 
forbidden. When this memorial tree was planted in Octo- 
ber, 1880, Mr. Shaw and his old actor friend, Mr. L——, 
were both present, and threw in the first earth to fill the 
excavation. 
But neither friends, nor books, nor music, nor drama, 
nor all combined, gave half the pleasure and satisfaetion 
for the last twenty-five years of his life, which the Garden 
and Park furnished him. He lived for them, and as far as 
was practicable, i them; walking or driving every day, 
when weather and health allowed, and permitting no work 
of importance to go on without more or less of his personal 
inspection and direction. The late Dr. Asa Gray—than 
whom there can be no higher authority—once said: ‘‘This 
Park and the Botanical Garden are the finest institutions of 
the kind in the country; in variety of foliage the Park is 
unequaled. ”’ 
Exactly when the idea of creating what is now Tower 
Grove Park first came to Mr. Shaw, is unknown; but it 
was doubtless suggested by what he had seen in Europe, 
and took active shape when the Garden was firmly estab- 
lished, and seemed to need some such supplementary ac- 
companiment. The first steps were taken in 1866, but the 
enterprise did not assume definite form until the following 
year. Since then it has proceeded steadily and system- 
atically, and, until his last illness, literally under the eye 
of the man who conceived this ‘‘thing of beauty’’ to be 
‘fa joy forever.’’ More than 20,000 trees have been planted 
here; all raised in the arboretum of the Garden. Mr. 
