Decorative Panel of Flowers at the Brooklyn Botanic Garden, Nov. 2006

Native Flora Garden

With more than two acres divided into eight geographical zones, this wildflower garden exhibits native plants growing in the New York Metropolitan Area, a region known for its natural diversity.

Dating back to 1911, the Native Flora Garden isn't just another wildflower display. In 1931, this wild retreat was ecologically designed to support nine distinct plant communities found within a 100-mile radius of New York City: serpentine rock, dry meadow, kettle pond, bog, pine barrens, wet meadow and stream, deciduous woodland, and limestone ledge, as well as a border mound with several representatives of the region's coniferous forests.

All plants in this garden are appropriate for their particular ecological niches, determined by environmental factors such as topography, geology, soil acidity or alkalinity, moisture, drainage, and light.

The Native Flora Garden complements Brooklyn Botanic Garden's long-standing efforts to research and document the region's plant life. While most of the botanical community focuses on tracking the devastation in the tropics, scientists at BBG are working on the most comprehensive study ever undertaken to identify and catalog the plant biodiversity of the New York Metropolitan Area. The region's rich diversity of natural habitats has been transformed by human settlement in the past 400 years. Understanding the resulting new urban landscape is critical in our rapidly urbanizing world. For more on this important research, including an encyclopedia of all woody plants growing in the area, see Metropolitan Plants.

Text from: www.bbg.org/exp/stroll/nativeflora.html