The University of California Botanical Garden is a 34-acre (13.7 ha) botanical garden located on the University of California, Berkeley campus, in Strawberry Canyon. The garden is in the Berkeley Hills, inside the city boundary of Oakland, with views overlooking the San Francisco Bay. It is one of the most diverse plant collections in the United States, and famous for its large number of rare and endangered species.
History
Development
The garden is situated on the land of the Chochenyo speaking Ohlone people called xučyun (Huichin). In the 1870s, a few years after the founding of the University of California, Berkeley, Dr. Eugene W. Hilgard, the university's first Dean of Agriculture, established a garden of plants on the land which is now Moffit Library.
The University of California Botanical Garden was initially established in 1890 near Haviland Hall on the north side of campus by E.L. Greene, the first chairman of the Department of Botany, to preserve the trees, shrubs, and plants native to the Pacific Coast. Modeled after the famous Crystal Palace in London, the garden's first formal glasshouse-style conservatory was built in 1894 by Lord and Burnham for $16,000 USD and housed palm trees and other tropical plants but was later demolished in 1924 to make space for more parking and the construction of Haviland Hall. The garden grew to house six hundred different plant species within the first two years.
In 1909, Strawberry Canyon was purchased by the university and in 1925, the garden was relocated to its current residence in Strawberry Canyon under the directorship of Thomas Harper Goodspeed, the university's Dean of Agriculture, where he stated “the eastward moving air draft from the Golden Gate … with consequent moderating influences on summer temperature and humidity, permit an association of plants, birds, and mammals not duplicated elsewhere in middle western California.” Goodspeed and J.W. Gregg, a professor in the Department of Landscape Design, are credited to have supervised the construction of the garden and its layout in Strawberry Canyon.
In 1932, James West established a rock garden in a collection now known as the "Deserts of the Americas" collection. From October 5, 1933 to May 31, 1934, over 200 young men, as a part of the Civilian Conservation Corps Company 751, built road and dam infrastructure, which aided in many of the garden's future projects. Goodspeed became the official Director of the garden in 1934 and remained the Director until 1957, where he led efforts to cultivate tobacco (Nicotiana), the Rhododendron Dell, the New World Desert collection, and the California Redwood Grove (now Stephen J. Mather Redwood Grove). Expeditions to China, the Andes, Southern Africa, Bolivia, Peru, Mesoamerica, Australia, New Zealand were conducted by Berkeley researchers and paleontologists to expand the garden's collections.
In 1976, The Friends of the Botanical Garden was established to aid with fundraising, volunteering, and public outreach in efforts to support the garden. The group was later dissolved in 1997 but an active group of 250 volunteers continue to aid in similar efforts today.
In 2015, the Garden celebrated its 125th Anniversary with the renovation of the Redwood Amphitheater located in the garden.
Recent History
After the Golden Gate Exhibition on Treasure Island closed in 1939, the Japanese exhibit was donated to the garden and relocated to Strawberry Canyon from San Francisco. For decades, two newt species, California newt (Taricha torosa) and rough-skinned newt (Taricha granulosa), have lived and layed eggs in the Japanese Pool, an 80-year-old pond.
In early 2023, leaks in the pond were threatening the existence of newts since newts would get lodged into the pond's cracks as water drained and attempt to get freed but eventually drown. In a statement, UC Botanical Garden Director Lewis Feldman said "[newts are] part of the diversity of nature,” and “their disappearance will probably impact on the garden in ways that we probably now can’t understand.” In summer 2023, the garden successfully raised $150,000 USD to empty the pond, seal the cracks, plug the sinkholes, and resurface the basin of the pond.
Collections
The garden has more than 20,000 accessions, representing 324 plant families, 12,000 different species and subspecies, and 2,885 genera. Outdoor collections are, in general, arranged geographically and nearly all specimens were collected in the wild.