The New York Botanical Garden (NYBG), one of the leading centres of botanical research and floristics in the United States.
It is located in the Bronx, New York City.
The New York Botanical Garden is a National Historic Landmark.
The 100-hectare (250-acre) garden, has a plant collection consisting of about 12,000 species from almost every part of the world.
The Garden contains 50 different gardens and plant collections.
There is a serene cascade waterfall, as well as wetlands and a 20-hectare (50-acre) tract of original, never-logged, old-growth New York forest.
Garden highlights include an 1890s-vintage, wrought-iron framed, “crystal-palace style” greenhouse by Lord & Burnham, now Haupt Conservatory, the Peggy Rockefeller Rose Garden (originally laid out by Beatrix Jones Farrand in 1916), a Japanese rock garden; a Herb Garden (designed by Penelope Hobhouse), a 37-acre (15 ha) conifer collection.
Also located at the garden is one of the largest botanical libraries in the country and an herbarium of 5,700,000 dried reference specimens.
Each year over a million visitors come to the garden’s diversity of tropical, temperate, and desert flora, as well as programming that ranges from exhibitions in the Haupt Conservatory to festivals on Daffodil Hill.
The garden also acts as a venue for teaching the public about plant biology, horticulture and the wider natural world. Hands-on, curriculum-based programming is available, and draws more than 300,000 people annually, many of whom hail from within the Bronx community. These initiatives focus on plant science, ecology and healthy eating.
The New York Botanical Garden most iconic building: a vintage, wrought-iron greenhouse that was inspired by London’s 1851 Crystal Palace exhibition.
The New York Botanical Garden was founded in 1891, largely through the efforts of Nathaniel Lord Britton, a professor of botany at Columbia University and his wife Elizabeth a bryologist (moss specialist).
The couple had visited the Royal Botanic Garden at Kew on their honeymoon and thought a similar park and conservatory should be built for New York City.
Groundbreaking took place on January 3, 1899 and construction was completed in 1902 at a cost of $177,000.
Since the original construction, major renovations took place in 1935, 1950, 1978, and 1993.
The New York Botanical Garden operates one of the world’s largest plant research and conservation programs, with nearly 600 staff members.