Missouri Botanical Garden

Description:

• Opened in 1859, this is the country's oldest and one of the world's top-rated botanical gardens: a 79-acre delight featuring the nation's largest Japanese strolling garden, a Chinese garden, the world's first geodesic-domed greenhouse, a scented garden for the visually impaired, a hedge maze, a home-gardening resource center, and themed gardens ranging from a Turkish Ottoman garden to an English woodland garden. A must-see for gardeners, who can easily spend 2 or 3 hours of bliss here, but for families there's also the Children's Garden, designed to resemble a mid-1800s Missouri river town and combining fun and education, with paths leading through woodlands and over streams to a pioneer village, treehouse, fort, rope bridge, cave, splash area, Osage Indian camp, and more.

• © Frommer's 2013