The final chapter provides a detailed analysis of strategies for successful partnerships and how they can be evaluated. It talks about the American Public Gardens Association's vision to make public gardens an indispensable part of communities. The APGA defines public gardens as institutions that maintain “collections of plants for the purposes of public education and enjoyment, in addition to research, conservation, and higher learning.” Gardens can best lead the way by establishing and demonstrating effective biodiversity conservation strategies in the midst of rapidly changing natural landscapes. One strategy is to preserve locally, regionally, or globally endangered species in their native habitats, which is known as in situ conservation. A second strategy is for public gardens to establish ex situ seed banks or gene banks at their sites that will preserve the genetic identities of species threatened or extirpated in the wild. Public gardens also need to be paragons of sustainable behavior, whether through LEED-certified buildings, SITES-approved landscapes, the use of solar panels and windmills, reduction or elimination of pesticides, or the use of electric vehicles. The public garden of the future will need to partner with architects, urban planners, and progressive corporations to produce a new generation of green buildings and urban gardens, so that cities will become centers of clean air and renewable energy and provide all their residents with easy access to nature.
This chapter discusses how developing public gardens has helped in improving the quality of science education. It features programs that are based at large, well-established gardens with strong board and community support. One such program is Project Green Reach (PGR) by the Brooklyn Botanical Garden. PGR is the project's response to the disparity between the science instruction at schools in wealthy neighborhoods, where parent organizations fund extracurricular learning and field trips, and the science programs offered by schools in disadvantaged neighborhoods that do not enjoy such support. Another program is the Fairchild Challenge by the Fairchild Botanical Garden in Miami, Florida, where students enter themed challenges throughout the school year. The chapter talks about Chicago Botanical Garden's Science Career Continuum which is focused on helping students get into science careers. The goals that motivated the creation of these programs are like those of many other public horticultural institutions — connecting people to plants, promoting the value and study of plants, and improving plant science education. The children involved in the programs are excited about science because of the way it is presented — they are encouraged to observe, to ask questions about what they see, to think of ways to test out possible answers to their questions, and to present their conclusions to their peers.
This chapter discusses how cities can be made more livable through public gardens. It differentiates livability from sustainability in that sustainability adopts a long view of actions and policies and the ways in which development, according to a report by the World Commission on Environment and Development, “meets the needs of the present without compromising the ability of future generations to meet their own needs,” while livability focuses on current conditions and interventions, incorporating the environmental, economic, and equity priorities on a narrower spatial scale relevant to individual people, neighborhoods, and communities in geographically smaller areas. Efforts to enhance livability are primarily community based and driven by issues of local concern that reflect changing conditions. The chapter discusses the public garden movement in the United States and how it began with the early recognition of botanical gardens as keys to economic development. The involvement of botanical gardens in the livability of cities came largely in response to the challenges associated with nineteenth-century urbanization. Our concept of livability has now expanded to include concerns for sustainable development, smart growth and urban design, and community-identified priorities such as access to fresh and affordable food and urban green space as part of the public realm. Finally, the chapter also discusses cross-sector partnerships with public gardens and how this leads to collective action and collective impact.
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