The Role of Public Gardens

by DIG-IT

When DIG IT! visits public gardens, we enjoy a double role: 1) that of the reporter looking for a good garden story and 2) as someone who loves gardens and wants an experience of the senses, just as anyone else would. After many visits to public gardens, we began to realize differences in both presentation and the personal experience of discovery, emotion, delight, and insight that comes from immersing one’s self. We began to ask: do public gardens have any responsibility to the public and, if so, what exactly are those responsibilities?

DIG IT! talked with public garden professionals to find the answers. The pros are: 1) Bruce Crawford, president Garden State Garden Consortium and director of The Rutgers Gardens; 2) Douglas Miller, historic site administrator of Pennsbury Manor; 3) Lesley Parness, Superintendent of Horticultural Education, The Frelinghuysen Arboretum, Morris County Park Commission and vice president of Garden State Garden Consortium; and 4) Daniel Stark, executive director American Public Gardens Association ([APGA] formerly the American Association of Botanical Gardens and Arboreta).

DI: What, exactly, is a public garden?
Daniel Stark: A public garden is a garden that is open to the public. The APGA represents 500 public gardens throughout North America. We changed the name about three years ago to be more representative of the diverse gardens that we represent…ranging from botanical gardens and arboreta to cemeteries, historic landscapes, public parks, amusement parks, zoos. It’s a wide range of institutions who display plants for the public to enjoy. Our role is to help promote those gardens and raise the profession of public horticulture.

Bruce Crawford: It should be one that’s open to the general public at least one day a week. Rutgers Garden is open every day to the public except for the days we’re setting up for events.

DI: Does a public garden have any responsibility to the public?
Lesley Parness: Every public garden has a mission and that is what drives the garden. To become a 5013c you have to have a mission statement, but what it is can vary widely. I think that a public garden has a responsibility to its mission first. There are public gardens whose mission is much more research based so, when you go there, the visitor experience may not be stressed. There are some gardens, like The Frelinghuysen, whose mission is entirely based on the public. We’re an idea garden. We’re supposed to be a resource for gardeners. So for us, yes, we do have a responsibility. Also, we’re funded by the public. So funding and the mission drive the nature of the visitor experience which could vary greatly.

Public gardens that get their source from public money – tax money – have different responsibilities from ones that are privately funded. Who is funding you is going to drive a lot of your mission, a lot of your decisions.

Daniel S: The responsibility they have to the public is to fulfill that mission and to give the public the experience that that mission would require them to give.

DI: What are a garden’s responsibilities to the public?
Bruce C: There are many levels: a) it fulfills its mission, b) it should be safe. It’s a given that you’re going to stick by your mission. You shouldn’t have to feel any more responsible or less. It should always be your driving light. We set up our mission to show plants in both a designed, created environment as well as a natural environment as much as possible. We do small pocket gardens so people are able to understand how plants grow in association together and they can learn from it. That’s one of our main missions.

That helps me when people are doing things. I can say, “ok. vegetable gardens, farm market.” The farm market does tie in to the vegetable garden which is, in a design sense, a garden and using plants. It does fit that. I do feel that we should be providing nutritional education. You can always construe your mission a little bit and the farm market is tweaking, but I feel it falls within the realm of our mission.

Public gardens should always adhere to their missions. Just because you invite the public in, there shouldn’t be any more or less strength in that. It should always be there guiding, and they should always feel they have to abide by it.

Note: Rutgers Gardens, purchased and established in 1917, with first plantings in 1929 and funded by the Horticulture Department, was set up to be a teaching collection for students and a research facility with peaches and apples on 70 cultivated acres. During the last 20 years, it became volunteer-based and self-sufficient. Its 180 acres include 70 acres of woodland and 40 acres of old research fields. “We work from a master plan. There was no mission statement until three years ago. That was one of the first things we brought to the table.”

DI: Do non-traditional public gardens who advertise themselves as such have a responsibility for the visitor experience?
Dan S: No, I don’t think so. They define the visitor experience. We don’t. There are no standards we set for people to be members of the association. There are some recommendations that we make. For instance, we recommend that the institutions have an operating budget, have a staff, are actively managing their plant collections – although there are some that do not. For important reasons we recommend plant labeling and things like that. We do not talk in terms of interpretation and how a garden should be interpreting their gardens for the public.

We don’t require it but we recommend that they curate their collections. We have some very prominent institutions that are not actively curating their collections. One great example of that would be Chanticleer in Pennsylvania, whose mission is to be a pleasure garden. They don’t label their plants; they don’t keep plant records necessarily and yet it’s probably one of the most beautiful public gardens in North America.

So, we’re careful about how we characterize what is or isn’t a public garden and should or shouldn’t be members of the association.

Note: A garden must have a curated collection to join Garden State Gardens Consortium.

DI: Does a public garden answer to a larger entity to show they are fulfilling their mission?
Lesley P: Usually it’s the work of the professionals at the gardens themselves to ensure that the mission is being forwarded. There are processes here that help to keep us on track, and at other gardens that I’ve worked at as well: surveys, evaluations.

DI: How important is it to stick to the mission?
Bruce C: Everything changes over time so you couldn’t say that the mission couldn’t be tweaked. It can change every certain number of years. Often times a public garden will do a physical master plan and a managerial master plan so those parts might get tweaked, but for what you have, that’s your guiding light. That’s what you should be sticking to and it helps you too because people say “can you do this or do that?” and you can very politely say “no, it’s not part of our mission.” The mission is a very important element to have.

DI: What about public gardens that seem to be confused on their mission?
Dan S: There are a lot of reasons why this happens:
1) There’s no clear master plan so what happens is whoever happens to be a gardener or a horticulturist starts putting plants in and nobody’s driving the bus saying, “Hey wait a minute. That’s not consistent with the intent of this garden and we have a clear master plan that says this is what goes here and this is what goes there.”
2) When gardens have very small budgets and they’re trying to manage with volunteers and the volunteers start driving the bus in terms of what’s going to be put where and they have their own pet plants that they like very much and the next thing you know you’ve got a mish-mash of things that were never intended to be where they are.
3) Without strong leadership and a driving force to make sure that it stays consistent to what it was supposed to be, sometimes it wanders. That’s a challenge that especially small gardens face that don’t have significant budgets.

DI: Do you think that a garden’s mission statement or goals can conflict with the visitor experience?
Bruce C: Interestingly, when you go to a garden you’re not always certain what that mission is. It’s hard, when you’re visiting gardens, to know whether they’re fulfilling their mission or not. Maybe public gardens should have their mission displayed publicly so that the public knows ‘what’s this place all about?’

Douglas Miller: I think a garden’s mission statement should be developed to be complementary to the visitor’s experience. We are an educational site and utilize our living resources as well as our historical resources to help us meet that mission. People come to Pennsbury Manor for an experience as well as an education and the experience would be severely lacking if we took the gardens and grounds out of that mix. When you are here you get a feeling and a big part of that is the immersive experience of being on these grounds.

DI: What is the mission of the gardens at Pennsbury Manor?
Douglas M: What is here still represents Thomas Sears’ hand. We are making choices about restoring elements of the Sear’s plan, for instance the allee of sweet gum trees. We lost some sweet gum trees and we are replacing them in kind. In other areas, such as the kitchen garden, we have changed it so it is more complimentary to our interpretive part of the mission supporting William Penn’s time, so we can grow plant stock that is utilized in our cooking program. We can do garden tours that are more accurate to what would have been around during Penn’s time. So it’s a balancing act. Click here to see Pennsbury’s landscape and to learn more.

We make conscious decisions as a staff about what we put in to the gardens. We have a written plan for management of the collections. We do have an updated landscape plan that is in the final draft because we have made major changes to the Sear’s landscape including the visitor’s center. In Thomas Sear’s time, that was an apple orchard. Now the needs and expectations of museum visitors have changed rather dramatically. They want up-to-date restrooms. Visitors want all the amenities and we want to give them those, so we have to make compromises with certain elements of the site.

For a 43 acre complex that is trying to maintain the balance of a colonial revival landscape choreographed by Thomas Sears and an interpretive landscape that supports Penn in the 17th century, it takes a lot of care and a lot of work.

DI: Do you think that having two focuses, as far as the landscape, makes it more difficult to deal with, as opposed to having only a landscape devoted to what Penn’s landscape looked like?
Douglas M: Most historic sites maintain the history of the full life span of their institutions but may only interpret one or two time periods. It is complicated. It shouldn’t happen accidentally. There are standards for best practices in museums, and part of that is to actually implement them with regards to all aspects of operations including the care and presentation of your collections, which include the living collections. It’s work that we all enjoy here at Pennsbury. It brings about a lot of good discussions and good thought from the collective staff.

DI: Should a visitor know what to expect at a public garden?
Bruce C: Yes, a garden’s mission should be publicized. For all public gardens, everything is public knowledge. If people want to look at finances for an organization, it should be on that. It should always be on quarterly or year-end reports to keep fresh in everyone’s mind what it is this garden or facility does.

Lesley P: I think that the visitor experience should be clearly stated on all materials, like if the roads are not paved. I think being clear about what visitors could expect is important. If your collection is labeled, say so; if you have an education center, say so; if you don’t, say so. If you only do self-guided tours, say so. Whatever the experience is, if it’s really not for the handicapped, say so. Don’t say it’s a leisurely stroll when you need hiking boots.

“It’s not that every garden is going to be the same or offer the same level of information or visitor amenities,” says Parness, “but I think they should be clear in their presentation of advertising materials.”

QUICK TIPS

Bruce Crawford on creating a mission:
It should be simple, clear, and concise so that there are reasonably no gray areas. A mission statement is not only important for the public to know where you’re going but it’s also very important for the institution because it guides them so they can, when people present other things, to say ‘no, that’s not our mission.’ It’s a great excuse not to go down certain avenues. The simpler, the clearer it is so that the public understands, then it works.

Daniel Stark on barriers to even an ambitious garden:
If a garden is not clear on their mission and where it’s headed, I think the leadership of the garden and the board or municipality have to have a clear master plan so everybody understands ‘this is what this should look like’ and start working towards that master plan and start building up resources to support the master plan. That’s the way that effective gardens function so that if somebody comes in off the street and says ‘where are you headed with this?’ you can say ‘this is phase 1, this is phase 2, this is phase 3. This is where we are on phase 1 and we’re moving towards completion on that and then we’ll start phase 2 and this is what was originally intended for this garden.’ It’s really important to have the historical documentation as well, especially for a historic landscape and to understand what was originally intended by the designer.

Pennsbury Manor: www.pennsburymanor.org
Frelinghuysen Arboretum: www.arboretumfriends.org
Gunn Memorial Library & Museum: www.gunnlibrary.org
American Public Gardens Association: www.publicgardens.org

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