Improving the Quality of Science Education

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.

A Look at the Future of Public Gardens

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.

Livable Cities and Public Gardens

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.

Promoting Neighborhood Safety and Well-Being

This chapter examines the approach, process, and outcomes of placemaking partnerships formed with public gardens to promote a sense of safety and well-being at the neighborhood scale. Cases in this chapter emphasize the intentional use of urban greening as a tool to empower residents to actively contribute to positive change, to elevate diverse cultures sharing common spaces, and to capitalize on existing assets in the community to manage vacant land. One such case is the greening of Brooklyn. The chapter discusses the efforts that the Brooklyn Botannical Garden (BBG) put into making Brooklyn green. The strategy of the BBG was to transform the neighborhood into a community of gardeners by initiating greening contests. It also talks about the efforts of the Queens Botannical Garden and how they took advantage of the diverse culture that can be found in Queens to make their area green by creating the ambassador program. In this program, they recruit twelve to fifteen ambassadors who speak in their native language to their communities on behalf of the botannical garden.

Access to Healthy Food and Promoting Healthy Lives

This chapter talks about community gardens that serve as sites for both food production and community education. The Bronx Green-up (BGU) is an initiative of the New York Botanical Garden. The BGU provides the technical support and materials needed for community gardens to succeed. The Green Corps, run by the Cleveland Botanical Garden, introduces at-risk youth to organic farming methods and provides them with opportunities to learn about gardening, nutrition, and environmental issues. The Growing to Green program, from the Franklin Park Conservatory and Botanical Gardens, has helped start, strengthen, and sustain approximately three hundred community or school gardens in Ohio. The Sankofa Farm at Batram's Garden involves the youth to enable them to get to college. Reflecting on the case studies in the chapter, it is clear that moving a community from a failing to a healthy state requires the participation of multiple entities: municipal agencies, social service organizations, community activists, for-profit organizations, and cultural and religious institutions. Each can play a role in making fresh produce more available and more appealing to those living in food deserts. By involving low-income residents in growing their own food, such initiatives will also enable them to feel in control of their diet and not at the mercy of what is available at the corner store. As gardens spring up in previously underserved neighborhoods, communities experience the ripple effects of reduced vandalism, trash, petty crime, and loitering.

Strategies for the Development of Successful Partnerships

This chapter distills the principal strategies that public gardens and their partner organizations can use to effectively leverage their collective power to create positive community change through the sharing of knowledge and resources. In particular, the chapter focuses on strategies that help public gardens, nonprofits, municipalities, and community organizations identify, select, and cultivate partnerships to create more sustainable, livable, and equitable communities. The strategies outlined in the chapter can be used by public gardens to assess their readiness for partnerships, to lay the groundwork for partnerships, or to further enhance an existing partnership. The strategies are likewise valuable for residents, community organizations, local governments, or other institutions that might benefit from partnering with a public garden. The recommendations and strategies outlined in this chapter draw on the information and experiences gleaned during the course of researching this book. The recommendations are not intended to be exhaustive, but rather to serve as models that public gardens and their partners can adapt based on their specific goals, community context, and assets. While the strategies appear to be sequential, the reader should recognize that building organizational relationships involves missteps, reiterations, and responses to changing circumstances.

Initiatives to Promote Ecosystem and Human Health

This chapter examines four programs where public gardens have contributed horticultural and ecological expertise to partnerships for the management of public landscapes and to increase public access to nature. In collaboration with other community institutions, the Missouri Botanical Garden, Lewis Ginter Botanical Garden, the UC Davis Arboretum and Public Garden, and Phipps Conservatory and Botanical Gardens have assumed a range of roles, including those of community convener, technical expert, and innovator, as part of initiatives that support the environmental health of their communities. The initiatives investigated in this chapter demonstrate that efforts to improve a community's environmental conditions must recognize the importance of understanding what the natural environment means locally and that a community has more than one story about its relationship to the natural environment. A community's history and the experiences of all its residents influence the perceived relevance of the natural environment, and the ways in which people conceptualize the need for and potential benefits of green space. In the cases of Lewis Ginter Botanical Garden in Richmond and the Missouri Botanical Garden in St. Louis, these environmental initiatives succeeded when they met their respective communities where they were, both physically and experientially. The chapter reveals an overarching recognition that partners and community stakeholders cannot “buy into” an environmental vision or initiative if they do not understand it.

Training and Employment Programs

This chapter discusses how community gardens help in addressing unemployment in inner-city areas. The programs profiled in the chapter address distinct groups within the overall population: military veterans and incarcerated and post-incarcerated individuals. Some of the programs mentioned are the Wind City Harvest, the Chatfield Veterans Farm Program, the Roots to Re-entry Program, and the Rikers Island GreenHouse Program. Despite the distinct needs of these targeted groups, the programs share certain attributes: (1) They recognize both the qualities and challenges of each individual; (2) they keep requirements for participation to a minimum; (3) they utilize both internal resources and experts to provide training; (4) they provide incentives and rewards to encourage retention in the program; and (5) they partner with other agencies to provide counseling and effective transitions to the workforce. Interestingly, the programs profiled extend beyond their home base (farm or prison) and reach their broader communities.