Many people think of botanical gardens as little more than highly landscaped parks. Full of beauty and peace, botanical gardens are indeed perfect for a few hours to yourself, and many of them were initially designed for aesthetics alone. However, most modern botanical gardens have evolved to become important scientific institutions and are key players in plant conservation and the education of the public.
The living collections of plants are often much more than attractive artistic exhibits. Many serve to maintain a living store of genetic diversity that can support a variety of conservation, restoration, and research endeavors. Like zoos, botanical gardens often work in tandem with each other, exchanging seeds, pollen, and other genetic information to preserve rare, threatened, or endangered species. In fact, a number of plants that are extinct in the wild are kept alive solely through the efforts of botanical gardens.
Less visible are the collections of living seeds in seed banks. Many botanical gardens have extensive seed collections, a large portion of which are stored primarily to guard against extinction and to use for restoration projects. One major seed-collecting endeavor has been spearheaded by the Millennium Seed Bank Partnership of Kew Gardens, which has joined botanical gardens across the globe to preserve the biodiversity of native plants. Incredibly, the project has banked almost two billion seeds so far, representing over 13 percent of the world's wild plant species. It is estimated that at least one-third of all flowering plants are maintained in living collections or in seed banks at botanical gardens around the world.
Many botanical gardens are also important repositories for dried plant collections known as herbaria. Herbarium specimens are collected in situ and then identified, pressed, mounted on archival paper, and stored with information about when and where they were collected. Some herbarium sheets date back centuries! Herbaria are commonly used for taxonomic research and are useful in identifying new species or sorting out misidentified plants. The dried leaves are an invaluable source of genetic information and have been used for numerous phylogenetic and ecological studies. Herbaria are also helpful for delineating the historical biogeography of known species and can provide insight into the original biodiversity of degraded habitats.
Some botanical gardens house extensive botanical libraries, paleobotanical fossil collections, ethnobotanical museums, or have expansive laboratories for research. Even small botanical gardens contribute to plant science by educating the public about the importance of plants and their conservation. Stop by your local garden to see what they're up to!
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