Public Garden Management

A Complete Guide to the Planning and Administration of Botanical Gardens and Arboreta

Donald Rakow, Sharon Lee

• Publisher: Wiley
• Year: 2011
• ISBN:
  9780470904596
• Edition: 2
• Topic: Architecture
• Subtopic: Urban Planning & Landscaping

The complete-and-ready reference for establishing, managing, and running a successful and sustainable, profitable public garden

As unique museums with living collections of plants, public gardens offer visitors aesthetically beautiful landscapes combined with educational programming and scientific research that promote the value and understanding of plants. In the twenty-first century, public gardens are in the forefront of organizations and institutions committed to promoting the conservation of plants and their habitats, developing sustainable practices that support the environment, and providing green spaces where our increasingly stressed and urbanized citizens can reconnect with the natural world. It is critically important that such institutions have trained, knowledgeable staff members. Because of its comprehensive examination of public gardens, Public Garden Management is the ideal guide for staff members at public gardens, anyone considering a career in public gardens, groups starting a botanical garden or arboretum, and students discovering how these complex institutions work.

Public Garden Management is an all-in-one professional reference and textbook that clearly shows how to develop, establish, manage, and maintain a sustainable—both economically and environmentally—public garden. Offering practical coverage of relevant topics, along with useful tools for reinforcing study, this insightful and forward-thinking guide is:

• Copublished by the American Public Gardens Association
  
  

• Written by a panel of leading experts in the field
  
  

• Filled with dozens of case studies that are real-world illustrations of the principles explored in the text
  
  

• Illustrated throughout with line drawings, figures, and photographs that assist in conveying critical information
  
  

Students and professionals will benefit greatly from the management principles outlined in this book, helping them establish and maintain new and existing public gardens that engage, inspire, and connect with their communities.

PART I

Public Gardens and Their Significance

CHAPTER 1

What is a Public Garden?

DONALD A. RAKOW

Introduction

If a public garden is any space that has been laid out for public enjoyment, then the history of public gardens can be traced back across both continents and centuries to such luminary garden creators as the Chinese emperor Shen Nung (ca. 2800 BCE), Queen Hatshepsut of the Eighteenth Dynasty of Egypt (ca. 1470 BCE), and the Greek philosopher Aristotle (384–322 BCE).

But in its modern context, a public garden is more than a property that holds a gathering of plants, even when those plants are laid out in an aesthetically pleasing manner. A public garden is both a physical presence that includes plant collections, buildings, and infrastructure and an organization that manages those elements and uses them to further its mission.

To answer the question posed by its title, this chapter will examine the essential criteria for a public garden, offer examples of the different kinds of institutions that meet those criteria, and identify the individuals and organizations that create public gardens and what motivates their efforts.

KEY TERMS

Curation: selecting, organizing, and looking after the objects in a collection.

Systematics: the branch of biology concerned with classification and nomenclature; taxonomy.

Accession: a new item added to a collection in a museum or library.

Accessioning: the act of adding a new item to a collection.

Herbaceous perennial: a plant whose growth dies down annually, but whose roots or other underground parts survive.

Woody plant: any plants with stems and limbs containing lignin; as trees, shrubs, vines.

Ethnobotany: the scientific study of traditional knowledge concerning the medical, religious, and agricultural uses of plants.

Dendrology: the scientific study of trees.

Basic research: research that is driven by a scientist’s curiosity or interest in a scientific question. The main motivation is to expand human knowledge, not to create or invent something.

Applied research: research that is designed to solve practical problems of the modern world, rather than to acquire knowledge for knowledge’s sake.

Mission statement: a concise statement that defines why an organization exists, what are its primary activities, and whom it serves.

Essential Criteria

In its essence, a public garden is a mission-based institution that maintains collections of plants for the purposes of education, research, conservation, and/or public display. It must have a system for maintaining plant records and professional staff. Further, it must be open to the public and provide accommodations for access to all people.

This definition is also useful in identifying what is not a public garden. A park may have beautiful ornamental plants and they may be well cared for by the maintenance staff. Likewise, amusement parks, shopping malls, and even hotels can have lovely and diverse plantings, and community gardens devoted to food production may be public. But such sites do not meet the essential criteria of being public gardens unless there is a mission statement driving their efforts and their plants are actively curated, that is, cared for as objects that are part of the collection of a living museum. Chapter 20 deals in depth with all that is involved with the curation of collections at a public garden.

Mission Statement

Whether it is being applied to a public garden or to a private corporation, a mission statement defines why an organization exists, what its primary activities are, and whom it serves. A public garden’s mission statement might focus on the types of collections it holds, how its collections are to be used, the focus of its programs and/or research, and who its primary audiences are. The mission statement should be the basis for all decisions and planning by the garden.

Plant Collections

Plant collections are fundamentally distinct from purely ornamental displays. Collections can be grouped either taxonomically (i.e., by family association), geographically (plants from one region of the world), functionally (groundcovers), or by plant needs (shade plants or plants for dry soil). One of the greatest challenges for public garden managers is how to merge the method by which collections are organized with the aesthetic goals of the garden.

Education/Research/Display

The degree to which a particular public garden is involved with education, research, or ornamental display will vary depending on the garden’s mission. Whether for primary, secondary, collegiate, or adult audiences, educational programs at public gardens focus on increasing an appreciation of plants and their value to society. Programs generally include classes, workshops, tours, outreach, exhibits, visitor information, and special events.

Research at public gardens has traditionally focused on nomenclatural or plant systematics and plant breeding issues. But increasingly, many gardens today emphasize plant conservation and biodiversity research.

Plant Records

An essential component of plant curation for all public gardens is the accessioning and deaccessioning of individual plants. Each plant added to the collection is given a unique identifying number, and records are kept of each plant that is removed from the collections, along with the reasons for its removal. Start-up gardens may not be able to afford a plant records specialist and may assign this task to the gardeners or even to the director. Whoever has the responsibility for managing plant records and whether records are kept electronically or in a notebook, it is essential that every public garden maintain a record of all plants that have the potential to be long-term additions to the collections.

Professional Staff

Individuals who are attracted to work in public gardens typically possess a different set of qualities than people who go into parks management. While public garden staff members recognize the aesthetics of how plants are combined in collections, they also value how those plants are managed and are used to further the garden’s educational or research mission.

The active management of plant collections therefore requires staff with specialized curatorial training, including a thorough knowledge of plant taxonomy and plant nomenclature. Typically, such individuals have backgrounds in horticulture, botany, or plant taxonomy, and are adept with the computer programs that many public gardens now use in curating their collections.

Open and Accessible to the Public

To be a public garden, a garden must maintain regular, posted hours and make reasonable efforts to accommodate those with disabilities or limited mobility. This does not mean that every section of every garden need be wheelchair accessible, but it does mean ensuring that every visitor is able to experience the garden in a meaningful way.

Types of Public Gardens

The origin of the public garden in the Western world dates to the sixteenth century in Europe. There—in cities such as Padua, Pisa, and Montpellier—medical universities created symmetrical, foursquare gardens filled with plants that were believed to be medicinally active. These hortus medicus gardens were then used as teaching sites for the medical and pharmaceutical students at these schools.

While public gardens have branched off in several directions since that time, all are living museums of curated plants, with programs in education, conservation, research, and/or display. In the following section on the types of public gardens, it is important to recognize that the distinctions between these types are becoming blurred. Increasingly, arboreta contain some herbaceous collections, botanical gardens usually have areas devoted to trees and shrubs, and display is certainly important to all institutions. In North America, approximately seven hundred institutions are currently considered public gardens.

Botanical Gardens

Botanical gardens contain a wide array of both herbaceous and woody plant collections, varied educational offerings for all ages, and research programs focused on plant improvement, conservation, ecology, or basic science. As the examples that follow demonstrate, if there is one characteristic that unites all botanical gardens, it is that they have botanically diverse, rather than simply aesthetic, collections of plants.

Brooklyn Botanic Garden, Brooklyn, New York

Established in 1910 on the site of a former city dump, today the Brooklyn Botanic Garden (BBG) occupies 52 acres in the heart of Brooklyn and contains world-class collections, including the Cherry Esplanade, the Cranford Rose Garden, the Japanese Garden, and the Steinhart Conservatory. But the breadth of BBG’s programs and influence is exemplified by its educational and outreach work. The garden is home to the first and oldest children’s garden in North America, and its education programs reach constituents in all age groups. One of its most innovative projects is the Brooklyn Academy of Science and the Environment, which the garden comanages along with Prospect Park and the New York City Department of Education. This mini–high school uses the resources of the garden and the park to educate young people on subjects related to the natural sciences and the global environment. BBG also offers an intensive Certificate in Horticulture program to individuals interested in professional careers in the green industry. Outreach efforts include locally based greening programs such as Greenest Block in Brooklyn and Brooklyn GreenBridge, family events, and research on the flora of the New York metropolitan area.

Chicago Botanic Garden, Chicago, Illinois

With 385 acres of natural beauty and twenty-three specialty gardens set on nine islands, the Chicago Botanic Garden (CBG) offers an incredible array of adult and children’s educational programs nested within the School of the Chicago Botanic Garden. Beyond its collections and public programs, the CBG has developed a depth of intellectual activities that are seldom fully seen or appreciated by the casual visitor. With highly regarded scientists and facilities on-site, it is a recognized leader in conservation science and horticultural research. In addition to workshops and symposia directed at professionals in public horticulture, CBG has formed academic partnerships with Northwestern University in offering a master’s program in plant biology and conservation, and with the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign in offering a bachelor’s degree in horticulture. Through its outreach division, the Garden disseminates plant-based information and answers inquiries on subjects of interest to home gardeners.

Missouri Botanical Garden, St. Louis, Missouri

Located in St. Louis, Missouri, but with conservation and research programs that circle the globe, the scope and complexity of the Missouri Botanical Garden (MOBOT) and its work is truly inspirational. MOBOT was started by a young hardware merchant who desired to emulate the great gardens of his native England. In 1840, when Henry Shaw was only forty, he retired from his hardware business in St. Louis and spent the next decade traveling, learning botany, and laying the groundwork for what would for many years be called “Mr. Shaw’s garden.” MOBOT houses some truly fabulous horticultural collections, including those in the geodesic-dome-shaped Climatron, the 14-acre Japanese garden, and the Kemper Home Demonstration Gardens. But in other ways, the institution more closely resembles a plant-based university than a traditional botanical garden. It is a leading center of conservation and taxonomic research and houses a world-class library, herbarium, and laboratories. It supports many major endeavors in horticulture, including the Flora of North America and the Center for Plant Conservation. It also offers accredited courses on the university level and educational programs for every age group. A great deal of credit for all that it has become is due to Dr. Peter Raven, its longtime director and an acclaimed botanist and environmentalist.

The New York Botanical Garden, Bronx, New York

Much as Henry Shaw was stimulated by his European tour to create a botanical garden that would emulate the grand landscapes to which he had been exposed, the eminent Columbia University botanists Nathaniel Lord Britton and his wife, Elizabeth, were so inspired by their visit to England’s Royal Botanic Gardens at Kew that they determined that New York should also possess a great botanical garden. A magnificent site of outstanding natural features was selected in the northern section of the Bronx. It includes dramatic rock outcroppings, a river and waterfall, rolling hills, ponds, and a 50-acre remnant of the forest that once covered the region. The land was set aside by the New York State Legislature for the creation of “a public botanic garden of the highest class” for the City of New York. Prominent civic leaders and financiers, including Andrew Carnegie, Cornelius Vanderbilt, and J. Pierpont Morgan, agreed to match the city’s commitment to finance the buildings and garden developments, initiating a public-private partnership that continues today. In 1896, the New York Botanical Garden (NYBG) appointed Nathaniel Lord Britton as its first director.

Today the Garden ranks as one of New York’s premier cultural resources, with its fifty horticultural collections and its fabulous special exhibits. But the NYBG is also a world-class scientific institution, with researchers in its International Plant Science Center focused on exploring, documenting, and preserving the earth’s vast biodiversity.

Fairchild Tropical Botanic Garden, Miami, Florida

While the previously described botanical gardens all house plant collections reflective of diverse geographic and environmental origins, the Fairchild Tropical Botanic Garden (FTBG) focuses its collections on species from tropical and semitropical regions of the world. Its palm and cycad collections are among the greatest in any public garden, and its collection of tropical fruits is internationally significant. In addition, the Garden has developed an internationally known and replicated education program, the Fairchild Challenge, which focuses on youth and plant science. Another of the efforts that distinguish the FTBG is its use of exhibits to attract greater and more diverse visitation. Some of these exhibits fit within the traditional purview of a public garden, such as “Windows to the Tropics,” its permanent 16,428-square-foot conservatory of plants from the humid tropics. Other, more temporary exhibits—such as those featuring works in glass by Dale Chihuly or monumental sculptures by Roy Lichtenstein—stretch the definition of what is customary at a public garden.

The Desert Botanical Garden, Phoenix, Arizona

The Desert Botanical Garden (DBG) emphasizes the flora of one habitat type—the desert—rather than a pan-geographic sampling. Its collection of more than 20,000 plants features a particular focus on the American Southwest. The desert also serves as the unifying factor in the DBG’s educational programs, which offer classes in desert landscaping, gardening, botanical art, photography, science, and healthy desert living. The survival of plants in the harsh desert environment is also the focus of the DBG’s research programs in floristics, conservation, ec...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Contents
• Title
• Copyright
• Dedication
• Acknowledgments
• Foreword
• Part I: Public Gardens and Their Significance
• Part II: The Emerging Garden
• Part III: Administrative Functions
• Part IV: Programmatic Functions
• Part V: Long-Term Initiatives
• Appendix A: Factors in the Development and Management of Canadian Public Gardens
• Appendix B: The Importance of Plant Exploration Today
• Appendix C: Herbaria
• Appendix D: Public Garden Archives
• Appendix E: The Library in a Public Garden
• Appendix F: Horticultural Therapy and Public Gardens
• References
• Contributors
• Index