Exhibition Spotlight: Extreme Tree Houses

A couple weekends ago, I visited the Missouri Botanical Garden's Extreme Tree Houses exhibition. I was intrigued by the opportunities a botanical garden might have to experiment with exhibitions that museums normally do not have. Botanical gardens are a cross between an art museum and a natural history museum, but outdoors and with living specimens. Like art museums, botanical gardens are places for contemplation, where one can enjoy the bounty of nature in a controlled setting. Like natural history museums, botanical gardens usually offer scientific names of their specimens and opportunities to use hands-on science.

I'm not sure what the Botanical Garden's goal was in installing this exhibition, but it does bring attention to an area generally neglected by garden visitors, the trees. From personal observation, most visitors are interested in what's at eye level - bushes, flowers, vegetables, and smaller trees. The Garden does have a beautiful collection of large trees throughout the premises, many of which were planted over 100 years ago.

The houses were all designed by local designers, architects, schools, studios and individuals, without much educational material. However, this does not discredit the merit of this exhibition.

Extreme Tree Houses is more similar to an art exhibition than an educational science exhibition. Since each house was hand-crafted by some type of artisan, each house could easily be considered a work of art. More than that, though, is the child-like wonder each house invites with their whimsical designs and basis in a childhood object. Though I never had a tree house as a child, I can remember wanting one and walking through each house made me feel like a child again, wanting my own tree house. In one I could imagine "playing house:"

While in another I conjured up an image of pretending to be an inventor/scientist and going on epic adventures:

Each house invited an opportunity to imagine another world - pirates, fairytales, magic. Overall, the exhibit was a magical journey I will repeat again.