Sonoma Botanical Garden facts for kids
Quick facts for kids Sonoma Botanical Garden |
|
|---|---|
Sonoma Botanical Garden
|
|
| Lua error in Module:Location_map at line 420: attempt to index field 'wikibase' (a nil value). | |
| Type | Botanical garden |
| Location | Glen Ellen, California, United States |
| Area | 61 acres (25 ha) |
| Website | http://www.quarryhillbg.org/ |
The Sonoma Botanical Garden is a special place in California. It used to be called Quarryhill Botanical Garden. This garden is a private, non-profit organization that focuses on education and research. It has one of the biggest collections of Asian plants in North America and Europe. What makes these plants special is that they are all from the wild and have been carefully recorded by scientists.
Most of the plants in the Asian garden come from temperate areas of China, Japan, and the Himalayas. More than 90% of these plants grew from seeds collected in the wild. The garden has many rare plants, like a special kind of maple called Acer pentaphyllum and a unique dogwood called Cornus capitata. You can also find many Asian dogwoods, lilies, magnolias, maples, oaks, roses, and rhododendrons here.
Contents
Discovering the Garden's Past
The land where the Sonoma Botanical Garden now stands was once a sandstone quarry. A quarry is a place where rocks are dug out of the ground. This quarry was used to get stone for building roads. It stopped being used around 1902.
In 1964, a big fire called the Nuns Canyon Fire burned over 10,000 acres in the mountains near Glen Ellen, California.
How the Garden Started
In 1968, a woman named Jane Davenport Jansen from San Francisco bought over 40 acres of land near Glen Ellen. She wanted it for a summer home. In 1970, she planted grapevines on the flat part of her property.
In 1982, Jane started thinking about the wild parts of her land. She met Roger Warner, who helped her redesign the landscape. He made it look like an English garden, using California native plants and rare plants from China. In 1985, Jane and Roger decided to work together. They planned to create a 25-acre botanical garden on the hillside.
In 1987, Jane helped fund the first trip to Asia to collect seeds. Soon after, her partnership with Roger Warner ended. Lord Howick, from the Howick Arboretum, then helped Jane focus her plan for the garden. They decided to create a garden that would help save rare and endangered Asian plant species.
Growing the Collection
In 1988, the garden started working with other famous gardens, like the Royal Botanical Gardens, Kew Gardens, and the Howick Arboretum. The property was named Quarryhill Botanical Garden. A small nursery was set up to grow the seeds collected from the wild. Planting in the garden began in 1990. The main goal of the garden was to protect these threatened plants and celebrate the many different kinds of plants on Earth.
Jane Jansen chose William A. McNamara to be the Director in 1994. He became the Executive Director in 2007. In 1998, the garden bought another 22 acres of land called Three Springs Ranch.
In 2000, Jane Jansen passed away. In 2002, the garden opened its doors to everyone. Before that, you could only visit by private tour.
In 2003, the garden helped create an online database. This database shares information about rare and endangered Asian plants with other botanical gardens around the world.
Facing Challenges and Changing Names
In 2017, the Nuns fire came very close to the garden. It burned on three sides of the property next to the garden. Luckily, the garden itself was mostly safe, with only a few burned fenceposts and lost grapevines.
In 2021, Quarryhill Botanical Garden changed its name to Sonoma Botanical Garden. It also expanded its mission to include California native plants, not just Asian ones.
Exciting Seed-Collecting Expeditions
From 1987 to 2017, staff from the garden went on trips every year to collect seeds and plant samples. They traveled to many places in Asia, including:
- Hubei, Sichuan, Taiwan, Tibet, Yunnan in China
- Himachal Pradesh in India
- Hokkaidō, Honshū, Kyūshū, Shikoku, Yakushima in Japan
- Nepal
They also went on a few trips to North America. The garden has also received wild-collected seeds from Japan, Taiwan, and South Korea, as well as Asian seeds and plants from other gardens in North America.
The garden now has about 25,000 plants that came from wild seeds. These plants represent over 2,000 different species. Most of these plants were planted starting in 1990. You can even buy some of the garden's plants at its Gift Shop!
See also
In Spanish: Jardín botánico de Quarryhill para niños
