Botanic Gardens: Modern-Day Arks

Landscape architects have always had a curious relationship with plants and botany. Everybody who has pursued a landscape architecture degree remembers professors’ warnings not to create planting designs like a “botanic garden” or “arboretum”—an emphasis on single-specimen plants with sometimes unusual horticultural traits (for example, topiary shaped into animals or big trees bred to have plum-colored leaves) that create one of the major sins of landscape architectural design—a cacophony of visual focal points. For those of us who earned degrees in the mid to late 20th century, large mass plantings of a single, usually non-native, species were one benchmark of successful planting designs. This tradition, which some can argue continues today to some degree, has left landscape architects strangely bereft of botanical knowledge whenever they utter the word “plant material” when they cannot identify a plant to the genus or species levels, which is more often than anyone would like to admit. Yet, interest in botanic knowledge and planting design in landscape architecture—and more recently architecture—have experienced a quiet renaissance as projects like the Lurie Garden in Chicago and the Highline in New York City demonstrate why public spaces with rich botanic diversity, which are inspired by each region’s native landscapes, can please just about everybody including the public and design critics.

Landscape architects’ changing attitudes about plants—meaning plants and botany matter—makes for fertile ground for a book like Sara Oldfield’s Botanic Garden: Modern-Day Arks. Ms. Oldfield is based at the Royal Botanic Gardens, Kew and is Secretary General of the Botanic Gardens Conservation International. The mission of the latter group is “to mobilize botanic gardens and engage partners in securing plant diversity for the well-being of people and the planet” (Botanic Gardens Conservation International 2010). Her richly-illustrated book challenges readers to rethink the Victorian image of botanic gardens with glass conservatories and annual flowering displays, which has lingered in the popular media and the public’s minds well into the 21st century. From her perspective, botanic gardens are the new global arks and genetic stewards of humanity’s coevolution with plants. With 200 color photographs as evidence of this mission, her approach to the subject matters makes the science and practice of plant conservation easily accessible to an international audience including the public, designers, researchers, students, journalists, and politicians.

The book features precedents to protect threatened plant species and their habitats, ecosystems, and landscapes. In the introduction, she succinctly explains the nature and extent of plant extinction crisis and how botanic gardens play an essential role in plant conservation. Following the introduction are sixteen precedents of leading botanic gardens and international collaborations from a wide range of countries such as the United Kingdom, France, Germany, Turkey, United States, Mexico, Brazil, China, Indonesia, Uganda, Madagascar, and Australia. Each precedent features a concise synopsis about the origins of the botanic garden or collaboration, threats to its particular ecoregion’s flora, important plant species of concern, major projects to protect its ecoregion’s unique flora, and examples of conservation science, practice, and outreach. After the sixteen precedents, Oldfield closes with a short conclusion about future planning issues, additional readings, and important web sites of non-governmental organizations and global biodiversity policies.

An important message from all of these precedents is that botanic gardens are a global strategy for protecting bio-diversity and promoting sustainability across scales. They are becoming internationally recognized for their missions that are centered on understanding the interactions between bio-diversity, cultures, and urbanization. To prove this point, Oldfield has included a number of precedents that coincide with global biodiversity hotspots like Brazil’s Atlantic Forest, Mesoamerica, Cape Floristic Province, South Africa, and Southwest Australia, which are ones that Myers et al. (2000) recently rank as highest conservation priorities for global biodiversity. For example, the Rio de Janiero Botanic Garden in Brazil, which is this country’s oldest botanic garden and was established to acclimatize agricultural crops in 1808, is a core site in UNESCO’s Atlantic Forest Biosphere Reserve, which is a rainforest system with over 20,000 plant species.

After reviewing this book, I can find a number of reasons why landscape architects will want this book in their collection. First, the most impressive aspect of this book is the breadth of the sixteen case studies represented. Landscape architectural educators will appreciate how the sixteen precedents are organized with enough information and photographs to be used in lectures and design studios. The precedents represent many of the world’s biodiversity hotspots and are often places that landscape architectural educators have not visited before. The narrative style of each precedent makes botanical science accessible to students at a beginning level of landscape architecture and horticultural programs, and the visual format of the precedents are helpful for students to learn how this type of research can be used to inform the design process. One suggestion of improvement to make these precedents even more useful would be more maps and plans showing where the botanic gardens are located in their respective ecoregions and countries and a plan of the botanical garden and its collections.

A second strength of this book is how many of the precedents are located in some of the world’s major cities, so there is an important urban conservation message about how botanic gardens can enhance urbanites’ contact and appreciation of nature. In fact, the presence of botanic gardens may help urbanites better understand what they are missing in their lives—enough access to urban nature. Examples of this emerging perspective can be found in the articles like Pinheiro et al. (2006) who present a proposal for a newly established Municipal Botanical Garden in Bauru, Brazil and Ward et al. (2010) who studied visitors at six of South Africa’s botanical gardens.

A third strength of this book is its numerous color photographs. The breadth of different types of plants and landscapes in this book is very educational in itself and one of the major reasons to purchase this book. One of the most unique aspects of the book is the photographs showing people practicing botanical conservation in different settings and with different tools. For an educator, these different photographs would be a helpful addition to lectures in courses like ecological design, planting design, plant identification, landscape ecology, and urban ecology.

I found this book to be delightful to read because it will resonate with many people from all walks of life. There are plenty of books for specialists about the science of botany, biodiversity conservation, and ecological restoration. This is a book that you can give to a relative and say, “This is what landscape architecture is about.” Better yet, this is a book that you can give to any designer, and you will truly win a place in their heart.