California Botanic Garden
Botanical garden in Claremont, California
From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
The California Botanic Garden (formerly the Rancho Santa Ana Botanic Garden) is a botanical garden in Claremont, California, in the United States, just south of the San Gabriel foothills. The garden, at 86 acres (35 ha), is the largest botanic garden in the state dedicated to California native plants.[1] It contains some 70,000 native Californian plants, representing 2,000 native species, hybrids and cultivars. The seed bank has embryos for the thousands of rare plants. The journal Aliso is published by the organization semiannually.
The garden originated in 1927 when Susanna Bixby Bryant established a native garden on her rancho in Orange County. The garden relocated to Claremont in 1951. The facility, run by a non-profit organization, was open to the public with free admission for 58 years; in 2009 an admission fee was implemented. In 2019, the garden was renamed "California Botanic Garden" to better represent the contents of its collections.[2]
Herbarium
The California Botanic Garden hosts the third-largest herbarium in the state (10th largest in the US), which is home to over 1,200,000 specimens. [3] The herbarium is a combination of the Rancho Santa Ana Botanic Garden and Pomona College herbaria (RSA-POM). It hosts the largest collection of Southern California plants in the world, totaling over 250,000 specimens. Most of the collection, around 95%, is composed of pressed vascular plants mounted on sheets. The ancillary collections of the herbarium consist of cone and fruit collections, wood collection, fluid-preserved collections, and pollen and anatomy slide collection. The herbarium also has a modest bryophyte collection. The RSA-POM herbarium is an active member of the Consortium of California Herbaria. [4]
The herbaria of Pomona College (POM) and Rancho Santa Ana Botanic Garden (RSA) have long been in association, being housed together since the Garden’s relocation in 1951 and fully integrated in the late 1960s.[5] Management of the separate collections was consolidated in the mid-1970s, but they were under separate ownership until the 1st of June 1996, when formal ownership of the Pomona College Herbarium was transferred to California Botanic Garden. The specimens acquired from Pomona College kept their POM accession identification for historic continuity. Since then, all new collections to the Garden have been accessioned under RSA. After the name change to California Botanic Garden, the herbarium still retains its RSA accession identification for historical continuity.
The Garden also houses herbarium collections from various other institutions, such as the Natural History Museum of Los Angeles County, the University of Southern California, and the Alan Hancock Foundation, which have changed accession identity to be under RSA or POM.[5]
