UBC Botanical Garden, at the University of British Columbia, was established in 1916 under the directorship of John Davidson, British Columbia's first provincial botanist. It is the oldest botanical garden at a university in Canada.
The garden measures approximately 44 hectares (440,000 m² / 110 acres) and includes over 8000 different kinds of plants. Visitors to the garden should expect to spend a minimum of one hour exploring the garden. Gardens include an Asian garden, an alpine garden, a native plants garden, a food garden and a physic (medicinal) garden.
In 2002, the UBC Centre for Plant Research became the research arm of the UBC Botanical Garden. The Centre for Plant Research examines topics such as plant adaptation, genomics and phytochemistry. The Botanical Gardens and the Centre for Plant Research are both encompassed by UBC's Faculty of Land and Food Systems.
UBC Botanical Garden also administers the Nitobe Memorial Garden, a traditional Japanese garden located on campus.
Famous quotes containing the words botanical, garden, centre, plant and/or research:
“Evolution was all over my chldhood, walks abroad with an evolutionist and the world was full of evolution, biological and botanical evolution.”
—Gertrude Stein (1874–1946)
“My garden is run wild!
Where shall I plant anew—
For my bed, that once was covered with thyme,
Is all overrun with rue?”
—Mrs. Fleetwood Habergham (d. 1703)
“To live and die amongst foreigners may seem less absurd than to live persecuted or tortured by one’s fellow countrymen.... But to emigrate is always to dismantle the centre of the world, and so to move into a lost, disoriented one of fragments.”
—John Berger (b. 1926)
“I grow savager and savager every day, as if fed on raw meat, and my tameness is only the repose of untamableness. I dream of looking abroad summer and winter, with free gaze, from some mountain-side,... to be nature looking into nature with such easy sympathy as the blue-eyed grass in the meadow looks in the face of the sky. From some such recess I would put forth sublime thoughts daily, as the plant puts forth leaves.”
—Henry David Thoreau (1817–1862)
“If politics is the art of the possible, research is surely the art of the soluble. Both are immensely practical-minded affairs.”
—Peter B. Medawar (1915–1987)