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New Growth in 2012

Here's what we've accomplished with your support:

The Collection

• With our magnolia collection recognized as the most significant for conservation purposes outside China, we were invited to join a consortium of thirteen other botanical gardens throughout North America to conserve and protect this ancient plant family dating back nearly 100 million years.
• We have become the world's only botanical garden with three cloud forest collections – our Mesoamerican, Andean and new Southeast Asian Cloud Forests, and the collections continue to grow. David Kruse-Pickler, our associate curator, recently returned from a collection and surveying trip to Ecuador's Maquipucuna Cloud Forest Preserve, gateway to one of the earth's top three biodiversity hotspots.
• Continuing our work to showcase and care for some of the world's most precious and imperiled plants, we now have over 300 rare and endangered species, some of which are extinct in their native habitats.

Library

Generous funding from the S.D. Bechtel, Jr. Foundation enabled us to open the Helen Crocker Russell Library of Horticulture, northern California's most comprehensive horticultural library, six days each week. Home to 27,000 volumes including a rare book collection, the Library recently made its more than 1,600 volume children's collection available for circulation to San Francisco Unified School District teachers and our members.

Youth Education Program

Serving 10,000 school children each year, our Youth Education Program continues to find new ways to make the Garden a hands-on laboratory of learning. With a shared vision of children as future stewards of the planet, the Save the Redwoods League has partnered with us to fund "Smallest Kids, Tallest Trees," a new program we created for kindergarten classes. We expanded our summer intern program, added new family programming, and collaborated with SFUSD, the California Academy of Sciences and other organizations to provide new professional development opportunities for SFUSD teachers.

Geographic Information System – Mapping Every Plant

In a highly competitive process, the Institute of Museum and Library Services (the primary federal funder of U.S. libraries and museums) awarded an additional two years of funding for our Geographic Information System program. GIS allows us to map plant locations and inventory our collections three times faster, all relying on GPS (global positioning system) technology. In the next few years, information only available through our curators and gardeners will be accessible to everyone through their laptops, tablets and smart-phones. Special thanks to the Blanche Thebom Trust and other individual donors whose gifts allowed us to advance the program while seeking the federal grant.