BROOKLYN BOTANIC GARDEN (BBG), NEW YORK

BROOKLYN BOTANIC GARDEN (BBG) The Brooklyn Botanic Garden (BBG) is a botanical garden in the borough of Brooklyn in New York City. The botanical garden occupies 52-acre (21 ha) in central Brooklyn, close to Mount Prospect Park, Prospect Park, and the Brooklyn Museum. Designed by the Olmsted Brothers, the 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. The 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 the Brooklyn Botanic Garden was first designated in 1897, following three proposals for botanic gardens in Brooklyn in the 19th century. The BBG opened in May 1911, on the site of an ash dump, and was initially operated by the Brooklyn Institute. Most of the BBG's expansions were carried out over the next three decades under the tenure of its first director, C. Stuart Gager. The 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. The 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. The 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.