Brooklyn Botanic Garden

 Brooklyn Botanic Garden (BBG) is a botanical garden in the borough of Brooklyn in New York City. The botanical garden occupies 52 acres (21 ha) in central Brooklyn, close to Mount Prospect Park, Prospect Park, and the Brooklyn Museum. Designed by the Olmsted Brothers, BBG holds over 14,000 taxa of plants and has over 800,000 visitors each year. It includes a number of specialty gardens, plant collections, and structures. BBG hosts numerous educational programs, plant-science and conservation, and community horticulture initiatives, in addition to a herbarium collection and a horticulture and botany library.

The site of Brooklyn Botanic Garden was first designated in 1897, following three proposals for botanic gardens in Brooklyn in the 19th century. BBG opened in May 1911, on the site of an ash dump, and was initially operated by the Brooklyn Institute. Most of BBG's expansions were carried out over the next three decades under the tenure of its first director, C. Stuart Gager. BBG began operating three additional sites in the New York metropolitan area in the 1950s and 1960s, while its main garden in Brooklyn fell into decline. The original Brooklyn Botanic Garden was expanded and restored substantially starting in the 1980s, and additional structures were built through the 2010s.

BBG's landscape includes many specialty gardens and a group of buildings on its eastern boundary, accessed from three entrances. A brook flows from the Japanese Hill-and-Pond Garden in the north to the Water Garden in the south. BBG's other specialty gardens include rose, native flora, Shakespeare, fragrance, and children's gardens. There are also more formal landscape features such as an overlook, a celebrity path, the Osborne Garden, and a cherry esplanade. The structures include the 1980s-era Steinhardt Conservatory, as well as the Laboratory Administration Building and a palm house dating from the 1910s.

Prior to the construction of the present Brooklyn Botanic Garden, there had been three proposals for botanic gardens in the then-independent city of Brooklyn in the 19th century, though only one of these botanic gardens was ever built. André Parmentier had created the Horticultural and Botanic Garden of Brooklyn in October 1825 within Prospect Heights, on a plot bounded by Sixth, Atlantic, and Carleton Avenues and Bergen Street this garden only lasted until about 1830. Brooklyn resident Thomas Hunt granted $50,000 in 1855 for the establishment of a botanic garden in Sunset Park (between Fifth Avenue, 57th Street, Sixth Avenue, and 60th Street). The Hunt Horticultural and Botanical Garden sought to raise $150,000, but the garden was never built at that location.

The third plan for a botanical garden in Brooklyn was included in the plans for Prospect Park, which was approved in 1859. In February 1860, a group of fifteen commissioners submitted suggestions for park locations in Brooklyn, including a 320-acre (1.3 km2) plot centered on present-day Mount Prospect Park and bounded by Warren Street to the north; Vanderbilt, Ninth, and Tenth Avenues to the west; Third and Ninth Streets to the south; and Washington Avenue to the east. Egbert Viele began drawing plans for the park, which was to straddle Flatbush Avenue and include Prospect Hill and the land now occupied by the Brooklyn Public Library, the Brooklyn Botanic Garden, and the Brooklyn Museum. The botanical garden was initially planned to be located along the shores of the park's lake. The onset of the Civil War stopped further activity; following the war, the triangle of land to the east of Flatbush Avenue was excluded from the park. The botanical garden within Prospect Park was not built. The northeast portion of the triangle served as an ash dump until just before the Brooklyn Botanic Garden was established.

On May 18, 1897, as the city moved toward consolidation, the New York State Legislature reserved 39 acres (16 ha) for a botanic garden. The site became part of Institute Park in 1902. The garden was to be run under the auspices of the Brooklyn Institute of Arts and Sciences, which until the 1970s included Brooklyn Museum, Brooklyn Children's Museum, and Brooklyn Academy of Music. By 1901, the institute sought to acquire a site on the eastern side of Flatbush Avenue for the botanical garden. This site had also been proposed as the location of a proposed Brooklyn university, but the institute wanted to establish a botanical garden on the site. Several of the institute's donors proposed in 1905 to give $25,000 for the upkeep of a "scientific botanic garden" next to the Brooklyn Museum.

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247 Prospect Ave #4, Brooklyn, NY 11215

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