A Winter Visit to the Garden of Bruce and Chick Buehrig

Bruce and Chick Buehrig weren’t impressed with the yard when they purchased their Bellerive Acres home with its sloping two acres in 1973. “It was nothing but large oaks and thin grass.”
Fast forward to a snowy January day almost fifty years later, and that scene is impossible to imagine-as is not being impressed.

They started the garden in 1993, trading golf for gardening. Bruce took a class at Missouri Botanical Garden, and the result is one of the most spectacular private gardens in the country, let alone St. Louis.
The garden has been featured on numerous tours over the years. From the Missouri Botanical Garden Tour, Pond-O-Rama, and multiple local Master Gardener tours to specialty tours like the International Conifer Society and National Hosta Society.

St. Louis Homes and Lifestyles featured the garden in their June/July 2019 issue, and horticultural publications like the hosta and daylily Journals have also featured the Buehrig Garden. Bruce and Chick have written articles for numerous publications, always generous with the gardening knowledge they’ve acquired.

Bruce and Chick are active West County Daylily Society members. Bruce and fellow hosta enthusiast Brad Shanker co-founded the St. Louis Hosta Society. Over 800 daylilies and 900 hostas call the Buehrig Garden home. Each plant is labeled and kept track of in an Access database, similar to the one previously used by Missouri Botanical Garden.
The Daylily Society maintains the Daylily Garden at Missouri Botanical Garden, and Chick and five fellow members of the club (called the Dayliliers!) are heavily involved in the annual daylily sale. $300,000 of the sale proceeds have been generously donated to the horticulture division over the years.

A summer tour of the Buehrig Garden during daylily season is indeed a treat, but a well-designed garden will look great even in winter. The Buehrig Garden sets the bar for ‘winter interest.’
Most noticeable is the terrain, a steep hillside with the house standing on top and a babbling creek running through at the bottom. UMSL’s campus towers over the garden at the far end, but the buildings are barely noticeable through the thick plantings.

Another notable feature is the amount of stone throughout the garden. Bruce designed the garden and had a contractor bring in the Missouri limestone from St. Genevieve to place them. “The first stones they brought weren’t big enough,” says Bruce.

The front yard features a circular lawn ringed with tall, stoic conifers, assorted shrubs, and during the summer, blooming daylilies. The perennial daylilies aren’t missed on a snowy day with a space so beautifully designed. A winding stone path lined with beautiful mossy stones in the front garden leads to an enchanting grotto. The beautiful stonework continues into the back garden, turning into a waterfall and pond that looks like Mother Nature herself formed it.

Secret sitting areas and sculptures dot the garden. One realizes what Alice must have felt like discovering Wonderland for the first time. There’s something unique around every turn, and it would take multiple tours around the garden to notice everything.

Then, of course, there are the plants. Conifers and Japanese maples among the mature oaks provide much of the larger plant structure. Bruce and Chick have layered their garden with every size and shape known to the plant world, and the results make this garden work on many levels, even in winter, when most other gardens are boring in their dormancy.

Public gardens such as Longwood, and Chanticleer in the U.S., along with Royal Botanic Garden Edinburgh, and R.H.S. Wisley in the U.K. are among the Buehrig’s inspiring favorite, but one needn’t wander so far when inspiration is just outside your window.