If the New York Botanical Garden is the city’s greatest cultural institution you’ve never visited, you’ll want to rectify that immediately. Founded in 1891 by forward-thinking citizens and funded by taxpayers as well as the nation’s most famous moguls (Carnegie, Vanderbilt, and Morgan were on the founding board), the NYBG was remarkable from day one.
10. The NYBG By the Numbers
Today, the New York Botanical Garden’s extraordinary library houses 75% of the world’s literature on systematic botany and 70% of the world’s published floras, says the New York Times.
A living academic campus as well as a botanical garden, it hosts the most important plant collections in the Western Hemisphere and archives over one million botanical artifacts. Its scientists travel to the four corners of the world on research expeditions and name 60-80 species a year. Its 50-acre forest of oaks and hemlocks, which has never been harvested, is New York City’s oldest. It is a place of more firsts and accolades than can be easily numbered. President Gregory Long calls it an advocate for the plant kingdom as well as a public museum without a roof.