Botany Garden to blossom with new expansion

The Botany Garden, a green and fragrant oasis in a sea of buildings and traffic, will become a larger, more welcoming sanctuary as an expansion gets under way in June.

The half-acre garden, situated along University Avenue between Chamberlin, Birge and Lathrop halls, will more than double in size to 1.2 acres. It will gain a new planting scheme, a central plaza, benches, a pond with bridge and waterfall, a dry riverbed and other features.

The new, expanded garden will feature trees, shrubs, herbaceous perennials and annuals with more than 500 species representing 100 families and 40 taxonomic orders of plants from all over the world. All of the plants will be planted according to their taxonomic classification, making it easier for people to identify plants according to their genetic relationships to one another.

“To me, this is like a jigsaw puzzle,” says Mohammad Fayyaz, director of the Botany Garden and Greenhouses, poring over a map of the new garden. “This is more than just aesthetics. It is an educational effort.”

To be completed by the end of the summer, the $400,000 expansion is being paid for with gifts directed to the project. The Class of 1952, for which the garden’s central plaza will be named, was among the primary contributors. The College of Letters and Science, says Fayyaz, has made the garden a priority, helping fund a decorative fence fronting University Avenue. More than $60,000 for the expansion was raised by contributions from the public visiting the Botany Greenhouses during the recent blossomings of the titan arum, a large and smelly plant native to Sumatra that rarely blooms in cultivation.

“We don’t have anything like this in this part of campus,” Fayyaz says. “Everything is covered with buildings. This will be like an oasis, a sanctuary for people coming to campus and for the campus community.”