About Botanic Gardens and Living Collections
What is a Botanic Garden?
The difference between a botanic garden and a public park comes down to the plant collections and their original purpose. While botanic gardens are places for recreation and enjoyment, they are also repositories for plant collections, playing an important role in plant conservation, education, research and display. This requires careful curation, with a focus on what we can learn about plants and how to care for them, using the gardens as both a tool for research and a place for the public to learn about plants – and learn to love plants.
The history of botanic gardens in Australia is a fascinating one, and in many cases a regional town’s preeminent public park is also its botanic garden. Commonly agreed criteria of “defining characteristics” for botanic gardens are based on those provided in the Botanic Gardens Conservation Strategy 1989 (see Figure 1) and while useful in defining a botanic garden, are somewhat problematic in the Australian context, where botanic gardens have their own unique culture and history, somewhat independent of the more formal scientific purpose of the world’s great botanic gardens.
Another description is that of Botanic Gardens Conservation International who define botanic gardens as “institutions holding documented collections of living plants for the purpose of scientific research, conservation, display, and education.”
What comes through in all definitions of botanic gardens though is the importance of plant collections, and the botanic gardens’ role in providing a place of respite and enjoyment for the public while fostering an interest in and knowledge of plants. Increasingly, Australia’s regional botanic gardens are recognising their capacity to do more than this, with greater emphasis on documented, carefully curated plant collections – moving away from the 20th century notion of botanic gardens as merely high-end public parks. To do this well, they need to have formally managed plant collections – commonly referred to as Living Collections.
What are Living Collections?
A living collection is an actively curated group of plants grown for a specific purpose. These can include education, conservation, research, cultural representation, storytelling, social benefit and ornamentation / display. Living collections are actively curated, labelled, recorded and displayed with each individual plant contributing to the usefulness and understanding of the collection as a whole. The best living collections, and ones of the most scientific value, will be curated for a particular reason and to meet particular aims. They will be well labelled and documented and accessible to the public and/or researchers.
Botanic Gardens of Sydney define a Living Collection as: “a group of plants curated, databased and grown, or stored, for a defined purpose, including for reference, research, conservation, education or ornamental display. Living collections include nursery potted collections and also curated live germplasm—such as seeds, embryos, tissue cultures, freeze dried fungi and cultures of symbiotic organisms— held in long term storage for future use.”
It is usual for living collections to be curated within a theme such as Taxonomic, Geographical, Ecological, Ornamental (display), Conservation or Cultural collections – with these themes being internationally recognised and replicated in botanic gardens around the world. Central to the idea of curation is that collections are not static. Plants are actively procured, cared for, recorded and at times removed from the collection – and these collections are made available to the public and scientists for the purpose of education and research. This requires knowledgeable curators, active record keeping and the support of similar institutions. This last point is especially important for smaller regional botanic gardens who rely on larger inner-city botanic gardens and organisations such as BGANZ for collections support.
For smaller botanic gardens this may be sounding overwhelming, especially for local government gardens where the focus is often on public amenity rather than plant collections (litter collection, not living collections). For gardens such as this it is important to remember that it is perfectly acceptable to do only a little and do it well. One carefully chosen and actively curated collection is all you need and has allowed smaller gardens to meaningfully contribute to plant conservation efforts. This Living Collections Toolkit will provide you with the information and support you need to achieve this.
The Difference between the Curation of Collections and Maintaining a Garden
Alongside zoos, aquariums and many museums, botanic gardens form a suite of what is referred to as “life science institutions”. It is commonly recognised that museum curators actively manage how their collections are curated – how their collections are acquired, documented, managed, cared for, displayed, interpreted and perhaps even disposed of (deaccessioned). What is essential in best practice curation across the world is also an understanding of why certain collections are being pursued. The collection as an end in itself is no longer considered sufficient. Additionally, there is a recognition that such collections are held in trust for the public and must be made available in some form. Similarly, plant collections (living collections) in botanic gardens are actively curated collections with specific aims and purposes.
As previously discussed, there can be a fine line between high quality parks and gardens and a botanic garden. Many parks and gardens are well managed with interesting landscapes, rare plants and any number of specific purposes and aims at their core. It is however the curation of living collections that forms the distinction.
For many botanic gardens, especially regional ones, collections curation is likely to occur on a gradient. An individual garden may only be able to actively curate one or two plant collections to a high standard, but may maintain many others for the purposes of public enjoyment, display, informal education or research by others. This is perfectly acceptable and provides an excellent option to efficiently target resources in smaller gardens.
There are lots of different ways to be a botanic garden. Alongside botanic gardens, a range of different gardens are potentially involved in managing plant collections, including arboreta, zoos, heritage landscapes, crematoriums, universities, public gardens, private collections and specialist nurseries with display gardens. The key element that would elevate such gardens into “botanic gardens” would be the extent to which they are actively curating and managing their plant collections. If desired, any of these institutions would be able to use this toolkit to achieve this.
Using the Living Collections Toolkit
If you think this Living Collections Toolkit may be for you, further information can be found by registering your garden following this link. After registration you will have access to detailed information on the process of developing a Living Collections Plan, access to the Living Collections Assessment Tool and the ability to add your own notes and develop your own Plan. Not everyone will wish to use these tools, and it is fine to register for information purposes only.