WHAT IS A BOTANICAL GARDEN?
Rex Burress
Since botany concerns the biology of plants, it should seem obvious that a garden of botanical species is about plants. Yet, there are various specializations in gardens, with maintenance and knowledge being common features of dealing with the vegetative kingdom thus collected.
A group of plant-minded enthusiasts, led by Scott Kent Fowler, is promoting a Botanical Garden for Oroville. This is an admirable cause and members are welcome and needed. Such projects are akin to the Master Gardener program of the area, that provides valuable plant information for aspiring gardeners and budding botanists.
Nearly all sizable cities have some type of botanical garden. Such a garden is dedicated to the collection, cultivation, and display of labeled plants, and some of the plant collections have become famous, including the Kew Garden in London, and the Missouri Botanical Garden in St. Louis. The intent is to nurture rare and interesting plant species that also provides an attraction to the public as well as having a place for research. Oroville has a handsome Centennial Garden on the river levee and there are other nice gardens around town, but they differ since a greenhouse and intensive propagation of species is involved in a botanical garden. Usually a herbarium of preserved species is included.
The number one, London Kew Gardens [1759], has over 30,000 species of live plants, and seven million pressed and preserved species in their herbarium! All told, there are about 1774 major botanical gardens worldwide. Jo's little minor greenhouse served as a mini-botanical garden operation when she was able to grow and transplant vegetable plants to put into Styrofoam cups to give away! There are millions of mini-gardens in home operations and they mirror the essence of the major botanic gardens—a love of plants.
Plant hunters have been prowling the world ever since Linnaeus started his classification of species, and many of those potential food and medicinal sources have been forwarded to major botanical gardens for study. Seeds and dried specimens have been involved in the name of discovery.
John Muir had a passion for plant study from his days on the Wisconsin farm throughout life, and often carried a plant press with him to preserve specimens. Many of his collections reside in the Jepson Herbaria at U.C. Berkeley, where there is also a fine botanical garden and greenhouses nestled in the hills above campus. Muir's plant fervor reached a pitch in college when he realized that the locust tree and garden pea were in the same family. In his searches he discovered three new species.
I spent many hours at the Berkeley site sketching plants for a botanical illustration class I was taking in the 1960's. If you really want to see the details of a plant, or any fragment of nature, just try drawing it.
One of the differences between a cultivated garden and wild gardens is the degree of maintenance. Wild plants contend with whatever weather prevails, and go through their various phases of growth and dormancy generally on their own and unsupervised, adapting to survive the rigors of the seasons. “God's garden!” The California Native Plant Society search out the growing places of wild plants and take great satisfaction in recording their wild condition and seeing their beauty.
Although botanical gardens serve a good purpose and create a certain intimacy with plants from faraway places, there's nothing quite as refreshing as to be confronted with a wildflower. Muir spoke about meeting the rare orchid, Calypso borealis, in a Canadian swamp: “Hush! We won't mention their names, for so rare were they, so delicate, so fragile, and so altogether lovely, that to even mention their names might frighten them away.”
“Flower in the crannied wall, I pluck you out of the crannies;/Hold you here, root and all, in my
hand/Little flower—but if I could understand/What you are, root and all, and all in all,/I should know
what God and Man is.” --Lord Alfred Tennyson