Santa Barbara Botanic Garden

As the first botanic garden in the nation to focus exclusively on native plants, Santa Barbara Botanic Garden has dedicated nearly a century of work to better understand the relationship between plants and people. Growing from 13 acres in 1926 to today’s 78 acres, the grounds now include more than five miles of walking trails, an herbarium, a seed bank, research labs, a library, and a public native plant nursery. Amid the serene beauty of the Garden, teams of scientists, educators, and horticulturists remain committed to the original spirit of the organization’s founders – conserve California native plants and habitats to ensure they continue to support life on the planet and can be enjoyed for generations to come. Visit www.SBBotanicGarden.org.

The Santa Barbara Botanic Garden envisions a world where society understands the interdependency bet

Goal One: Invest in the Garden as a model for the diversity, beauty, and sustainability of native plants and habitats and provide expertise to inspire learning, love, and engagement.

Goal Two: Expand off-site outreach and programming to demonstrate the power of native plants and habitat to save the planet while targeting a broader and more diverse audience.

Goal Three: Create and leverage user-focused digital content that inspires everyone to plant native plants and provides the tools to succeed.

In addition to ongoing professional development related to work available to staff at all levels of the organization, senior leaders regularly participate in offsite planning and team building retreats, are active in professional associations where they can share and learn from their colleagues and peers at other institutions. Participation in professional conferences are also encouraged.

With initial statewide shutdowns, we had to close our doors. During the 2 months that we were completely closed, we undertook several rebuilding projects (trails, stairs, large scale replanting) while the Garden did not have visitors. Working with our local health officials, we were able to establish protocols that would allow for the safe use of our garden by the public, which then allowed us to initially reopen to our members, and later all of the public (with strict capacity limits, one way trails, and masking). We shifted all of our classes and programming online, but once we were able to open, invested in temporary chalkboard interpretive signage to tell those transitory stories that docents would have under pre-pandemic conditions. Our conservation team, rather than being able to carpool to our field sites, would take multiple vehicles for fieldwork, requiring the use not only of personal vehicles but also the purchase of an additional Garden owned field vehicle. As we have exited the pandemic, our garden has never been in better physical condition, our visitation is at its highest level ever, and we have brought in more conservation contracts than we had ever secured previously.