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Brooklyn Botanic Garden

The mission of the Brooklyn Botanic Garden is to serve the local community and the world by: displaying plants and practicing the art of horticulture; engaging in research in plant sciences and disseminating the results to science professionals and the general public; teaching children and adults about plants; reaching out to help people enhance the quality of their surroundings and their daily lives through the cultivation and enjoyment of plants; and seeking to arouse public awareness of the natural environment, both locally and globally, and providing information about ways to conserve and protect it.

Over 750,000 visitors annually visit the Brooklyn Botanic Garden’s 52 acres, where over 7,000 taxa are grown. The Garden is world renowned for its fragrance garden (the first of its kind), Japanese garden, and bonsai collection.

The Garden’s education programs serve over 100,000 inner-city children annually. The award-winning Children’s Garden program, founded in 1914 and the oldest of its kind in continuous operation, has been a prototype for children’s gardens worldwide. The Garden also serves thousands of adults annually with its 120 continuing education classes.

One of the Garden’s most far-reaching educational tools is its award-winning 21st-Century Gardening Series of handbooks, which explore the frontiers of ecological landscaping. Through its GreenBridge outreach programs, the Garden helps neighborhood organizations and schools improve their inner-city environments.

Botanical research at the Garden has been quite varied, including floristic studies of the New York Metropolitan region, field studies in the Amazon and the Galapagos, and early studies in bacteriology and plant pathology. Today, major research initiatives focus on floristic studies and conservation projects in the northeastern United States, as well as the taxonomy of cultivated plants.