Botanical Gardens

Botanical Gardens

A botanical garden is a place where living plants of many different varieties, collected from different parts of the world, are grown together in a scientific and systematic way, in their natural living ("in vivo") state — unlike a herbarium, which preserves a plant only as a dried, dead specimen. Every plant in a botanical garden is labelled, with the label board showing both the plant's scientific (Latin binomial) name and its common name, so that visitors and students alike can learn to associate the two.

Because a botanical garden may hold plant species that are native to climates very different from its own location, many botanical gardens maintain a greenhouse — a structure with artificially controlled temperature, humidity and light — so that tropical, alpine or other climate-specific species can still be grown and kept alive year-round, even though the outdoor climate at the garden's location would not naturally support them.

A short history. The world's first botanical garden was established in 1543 at Pisa, Italy, by Professor Luca Ghini (1490–1556) — the same taxonomist credited with pioneering the herbarium technique. Today, the Royal Botanic Gardens at Kew, in England, is renowned for holding the largest such collection in the world: more than 30,000 living/preserved plant specimens and more than 7 million herbarium sheets.

Conservation of Biodiversity

Biodiversity is the degree of variation among life forms present within an ecosystem. It is essential for maintaining ecological stability — in fact, the richness and complexity of an ecosystem's biodiversity is often used as a direct measure of that ecosystem's overall health. Unfortunately, population growth and the over-exploitation of natural resources have driven a rapid loss of biodiversity worldwide.

Conservation refers to deliberate efforts to slow down, halt, or even reverse this loss, generally by protecting a species within its own natural habitat — this approach is known as in-situ conservation (botanical gardens themselves, by contrast, are a form of ex-situ conservation, since the plants are grown away from their original habitat). …