St. Louis – Botanical Gardens

We found our way to St. Louis, and our trusty Android phone’s GPS guided us to George & Barb Johnson’s home on Amherst Ave.  George and I were friends and roommates as graduate students at Stanford, and yes, our common name created interesting situations (some of them best discussed elsewhere).   For a while we had a third roommate named – you guessed it – George.

Jan & George J, Climatron in back.

Japanese Garden - the zig-zags make it hard for evil spirits to follow.

GBJ (George Brooks Johnson) was hired by Washington University’s Biology department straight from his Ph.D. work at Stanford, very unusual even at that time.  But after making a significant mark in molecular evolutionary genetics, he found himself drawn more to education than research, and has made quite a career for himself as an author of college and high school textbooks (see http://txtwriter.com/)

First stop after our arrival was a brief visit to the world-famous St. Louis Botanical Gardens, a gorgeous and fascinating place.  The Director of the gardens for the past forty years had been Peter Raven, our common friend from Stanford, who just retired last year.  We’d hoped to see him on our visit, but the day we arrived he was on his way to the Galapagos – very poor sense of priorities.  😉  But we thought of him as we explored the beautiful and serene Japanese Garden.