One Step Closer to A New Native Plant Garden
Posted in Around the Garden on November 17 2010, by Plant Talk
| Travis Beck, Landscape and Gardens Project Manager, The New York Botanical Garden |
Native plants have always been at the heart of The New York Botanical Garden. The site where the Garden now sits was, in large part, chosen by founding director Nathaniel L. Britton in 1895 because of the site’s 50-acre old growth Forest and its vibrant population of native plants. Britton‘s wife Elizabeth was a passionate advocate for native plants and a founding member of the Wildflower Society, one of the earliest groups dedicated to the conservation of the native plants of North America.
In 1946 a wild garden adjacent to the Native Forest, planted with native ferns and flowers was dedicated to her. The site was expanded into the Native Plant Garden in the late 1960s. The expanded garden consisted of vignettes featuring plants from around the region, but by the late 1990s, large portions of the garden were choked by invasive species, and many of the original plantings were no longer recognizable.
A major gift from the Leon Levy Foundation has allowed the Botanical Garden to undertake the creation of a new Native Plant Garden, to restore the “heart of the Garden.” And today, a milestone was reached in the creation of this new garden: The Native Plant Garden received its first new resident, a white oak. Planted near Britton Rock, the oak tree replaces an oak lost in one of this past summer’s violent storms.
It’s a small step, but every garden starts small, no matter how big it will eventually become.
