Geico has a gecko. AFLAC has a duck. Liberty Mutual has an emu.
But topping them all is Shelter Insurance Company, which has a five-acre botanical garden, located at its corporate campus at 1917 West Broadway in Columbia. More than a thousand people attended Shelter Gardens’ grand opening in August 1975, and it has now hosted countless picnics, orchestral concerts, weddings, school field trips, and university research visits, as well as serving as a de rigueur backdrop for prom photos and senior pictures.
Shelter Gardens is open every day between 8 a.m. and dusk, except Christmas and on days with inclement weather, and it is completely free to the public. It is usually found high on the list of “must-see” attractions in local and regional visitor guides.
Today, a stone and wrought iron fence surrounds the five-acre garden, which contains more than 300 varieties of trees and shrubs and more than 15,000 annuals and perennials. Every variety of plant life in the gardens features a marker displaying botanical information for the species, including its scientific and common names.
Shelter Gardens contains fourteen features, among them a waterfall, rock garden, Vietnam veterans memorial, replica 19th-century schoolhouse, a gazebo for concerts, and various themed areas, including a desert landscape and a Japanese maple garden. The one-room schoolhouse is based on the Newcomer School, where the company that later became Shelter Insurance was founded in 1914 by seven farmers in Brunswick, Missouri. (The insurance company started in 1946 as an offshoot of the farm club.)
According to the company’s website, the garden was the idea of Scotty Garrett, a Shelter employee. Garrett, who had been a groundskeeper in Scotland before moving to Missouri, had a vision of turning the former 56-acre farm into a tree- and flower-filled oasis for the whole city to enjoy. Fifty years later, Columbia’s residents and visitors are the lucky beneficiaries of that vision.
