Other Gardens and Collections
Other Gardens and Plants of Interest
The Arboretum & Botanic Garden maintains collections of plants from Mediterranean-climates around the world, some of which are rare and/or threatened plants of unusual scientific interest. Particular specialties are world conifers, primitive angiosperms, and bulb-forming plant families. In addition to our large assemblages of plants from California natives, Australia, South Africa, and New Zealand that are grown and displayed in the gardens, we have many other species in our collections that are not otherwise available for viewing or study in American botanical gardens and arboreta.
The Harrisons’ Future Garden
Future Garden for the Central Coast of California is a major art and science project by internationally renowned eco-artists and UC Santa Cruz emeritus faculty Newton Harrison and his late wife and lifelong collaborator, Helen Meyer Harrison. The site-specific environmental art installation is located in the three geodesic domes and the surrounding garden just beyond our succulent garden, below the Horticulture buildings. The Harrisons worked with scientists at UC Santa Cruz and botanists at the Arboretum, along with other artists, scientists, and visionaries, to create trial gardens within the domes in which native plant species are subjected to the temperatures and water conditions that scientists see for the region in the near future. Learn more about the Future Gardens.
World Conifers
Though potentially of great scientific interest, conifers, as a group, are not well studied, mostly because of the unavailability of research material. In much of the world, conifers tend to be difficult garden subjects. In general they are highly intolerant of air pollution and poor-quality irrigation water. Some cannot tolerate summer rain. Others cannot tolerate frost. Few areas can grow more than a small number of species.
In establishing its conifer collection, the Garden capitalized upon its remarkable horticultural potential. The collection contains representatives of all nearly all known genera of conifers, with the exception of a genus unknown outside of China and a parasitic New Caledonian genus.
The Laurasian Forest
This section serves to hold various interesting North American plants, particularly high-altitude Mexican species – many of which are potentially of use in plant breeding or landscaping or in the development of student interest in the flora or the Western U.S.
North Temperate Forest Collection
Plants are from the temperate rather than tropical or arctic parts of North America, Europe, and Asia. On some of our maps it is called the Laurasian Forest, a reference to the theory of plate tectonics. The southern supercontinent was called Gondwana and the Northern was called Laurasia. After the break up by tectonic forces of the continents into North America, Europe and Asia (not including India) there remain some similar plant families from within these three major areas.
Primitive Flowering Plants
This collection contains “living fossils” among the world’s flowering plants. They are of unusual interest because of the unlikelihood that ample fossil evidence of the earliest flowering plants will ever be found. The collection contains many difficult-to-grow species and is essentially unique. It has attracted scientists from far corners of the world and is now being used by molecular systematists, who hope to use modern methods to shed light upon the origins of flowering plants.