Botanical garden

Inside the United States Botanic Garden
Washington, D.C.

Botanical gardens grow a wide variety of plants primarily to categorize and document for scientific purposes. Botanists and horticulturalists tend the flora and maintain the garden's library and herbarium of dried and documented plant material. Botanical gardens may also serve to entertain and educate the public, upon whom many depend for funding. However, not all botanical gardens are open to the public: for example the Chelsea Physic Garden. According to the Botanic Gardens Conservation International, "Botanic gardens are institutions holding documented collections of living plants for the purposes of scientific research, conservation, display and education."

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Contents

Research

From the late 18th century onward, European botanical gardens began sending plant-collecting expeditions to various parts of the world and publishing their findings. Voyages of exploration routinely included botanists for this purpose. Subsequent scientific work studied how these exotic plants might be adapted to grow in the garden's locale, how to classify them, and how to propagate rare or endangered species. The Royal Botanic Gardens in Kew, near London, has continuously published journals and more recently catalogues and databases since this time.

Educational work

Educational projects at botanical gardens range from introductions to plants that thrive in different environments to practical advice for the home gardener. Many have plant shops, selling flower, herb, and vegetable seedlings suitable for transplantation. Some gardens such as the UBC Botanical Garden and Centre for Plant Research and the Chicago Botanic Garden have plant breeding programs and introduce new plants to the horticultural trade.

Inside the United States Botanic Garden

Inside Kew Gardens Palm House

The Botanical Garden of Curitiba, Southern Brazil

A botanical garden of Kitchener's Island, Aswan

University of British Columbia Botanical Garden

Inside the Botanical Garden of the University of Coimbra, Portugal

History

Inside the Rio de Janeiro Botanic Garden (Brazil), 1890

The first modern botanical gardens were founded in Northern Italy in connection with universities:

Other European towns and universities then followed suit:

Egypt has several botanical gardens. One them, the Orman Garden in Giza, is over 130 years old.

See also

External links

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  • This page was last modified on 4 January 2009, at 20:02.

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