A botanical garden or botanic garden is a garden with a documented collection of living plants for the purpose of scientific research, conservation, display, and education. It is their mandate as a botanical garden that plants are labelled with their botanical names. It may contain specialist plant collections such as cacti and other succulent plants, herb gardens, plants from particular parts of the world, and so on; there may be glasshouses or shadehouses, again with special collections such as tropical plants, alpine plants, or other exotic plants that are not native to that region.
The New York Botanical Garden (NYBG) is a botanical garden at Bronx Park in the Bronx, New York City. Established in 1891, it is located on a 250-acre (100 ha) site that contains a landscape with over one million living plants; the Enid A. Haupt Conservatory, a greenhouse containing several habitats; and the LuEsther T. Mertz Library, which contains one of the world's largest collections of botany-related texts. As of 2016, over a million people visit the New York Botanical Garden annually.
Ethnobotany is the study of a region's plants and their practical uses through the traditional knowledge of a local culture and people. An ethnobotanist thus strives to document the local customs involving the practical uses of local flora for many aspects of life, such as plants as medicines, foods, intoxicants and clothing. Richard Evans Schultes, often referred to as the "father of ethnobotany", explained the discipline in this way:
Ethnobotany simply means investigating plants used by primitive societies in various parts of the world.
Sir Ghillean Tolmie Prance is a prominent British botanist and ecologist who has published extensively on the taxonomy of families such as Chrysobalanaceae and Lecythidaceae, but drew particular attention in documenting the pollination ecology of Victoria amazonica. Prance is a former director of the Royal Botanic Gardens, Kew.
Jean Baptiste Christophore Fusée Aublet was a French pharmacist, botanist and one of the earliest botanical explorers in South America. He was one of the first botanists to study ethnobotany in the Neotropics.
Coccothrinax argentea is a palm which is endemic to Hispaniola.
Paul Alan Cox is an American ethnobotanist whose scientific research focuses on discovering new medicines by studying patterns of wellness and illness among indigenous peoples. Cox was born in Salt Lake City in 1953.
David George Campbell is an American educator, ecologist, environmentalist, and award-winning author of non-fiction. He is the son of George R. Campbell and Jean Blossom Weilepp.
The LuEsther T. Mertz Library is located at the New York Botanical Garden (NYBG) in the Bronx, New York City. Founded in 1899 and renamed in the 1990s for LuEsther Mertz, it is the United States' largest botanical research library, and the first library whose collection focused exclusively on botany.
Henry Hurd Rusby (1855–1940) was an American botanist, pharmacist and explorer. He discovered several new species of plants and played a significant role in founding the New York Botanical Garden and developing research and exploration programs at the institution. He helped to establish the field of economic botany, and left a collection of research and published works in botany and pharmacology.
Daniel Atha is an American botanist. In his work as a botanist he has collected plants in all 50 states of the United States, as well as several additional countries. Atha's work was focused on three areas: "floristics—what plants grow in a particular region; taxonomy—how to tell one plant from another, what to call it and what it's related to; and applied botany—how plants are used for food, medicine, shelter and other useful purposes." Atha has been known as a prominent regional botanist, and the high-profile botanical projects with which he has been involved have garnered national and international attention.
The Society for Ethnobotany is an international learned society covering the fields of ethnobotany and economic botany. It was established in 1959. In 2022 the Society voted to change its name from the Society for Economic Botany to the Society for Ethnobotany, going into effect in June 2023. Its official journal is Economic Botany, published on their behalf by Springer Science+Business Media and the New York Botanical Garden Press. The society also publishes a biannual newsletter, Plants and People. The society organizes annual meetings at different locations around the world, where it awards the prize of Distinguished Ethnobotanist to particularly meritorious individuals.
Jan Salick is an American botanist who researches the interaction between humans and plants (ethnobotany) and conservation biology. Her specialisms include alpine environments, climate change, indigenous peoples and traditional knowledge. She is a past-president of the Society for Economic Botany and holds their Distinguished Economic Botanist award. She is also Fellow of the American Association for the Advancement of Science and received the Fairchild Medal for Plant Exploration. In 2019 she retired as Senior Curator of Ethnobotany at the Missouri Botanical Garden, and now has emerita status.
Ina Vandebroek is an ethnobotanist working in the areas of floristics, ethnobotany and community health. Since 2005, she has worked at the New York Botanical Garden in the Institute of Economic Botany. She has worked on ethnobotanical projects in North America, the Caribbean, and South America.
Howard Samuel Irwin Jr. was an American botanist and taxonomist who specialized in the genus Cassia and worked as an administrator at the New York Botanical Garden, Long Island University, and the Brooklyn Botanic Garden.
Brian Morey Boom is an American botanist who specializes in the flora of the Guianas and the Caribbean, the family Rubiaceae, ethnobotany, and economic botany.
Scott Alan Mori was a Swiss and American botanist and plant collector. He specialized in the systematics and ecology of neotropical Lecythidaceae and Amazonian and Guianian floristics.
John James Pipoly III is an American botanist and plant collector. He is a leading expert on the systematics and taxonomy of the genus Ardisia within the Myrsinoideae, as well as the family Clusiaceae.
Rainer W. Bussmann is a German botanist and vegetation ecologist, specializing in ethnobotany and ethnobiology, wild food plants, wild crop relatives, climate change, gastronomic botany and preservation of traditional knowledge in the Andes, the Caucasus and the Himalayas. He has worked at the University of Bayreuth, University of Hawaii, University of Texas, the Missouri Botanical Garden, Ilia State University and the State Museum of Natural History Karlsruhe; he has founded several international non-governmental organizations, including Nature and Culture International, Saving Knowledge, and Ethnomont.
Ben-Erik van Wyk FAAS is a South African professor of indigenous botany and traditional African medicine at the University of Johannesburg.
