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"What's so fascinating about the plants of Australia and
South Africa is that once those continents were one, and all those
plants lived together. Over time the continents divided, but
there are still so many similarities between the plant
species," Hamm explains. Explorers also had a role in
introducing new flora and in changing the cultures in these
regions. Their routes are additional lines in the story the
globe tells.
Other displays will offer a range of
educational opportunities. The Regional Signature Exhibits
recreate the settings of the five mediterranean climate zones as a
back drop for interactive exhibits such as crawl-through soil
profiles. Children can bring in plants and trade them for
objects from the garden's collection at the Nature Exchange, while
weather fanatics learn how land and ocean create weather patterns,
which in turn affect landforms, in the Weather Theater.
Outside, surrounding the visitor center, the five Gardens of
Exploration continue the study of natural/cultural
interactions. Explorers don't have to stay on the paths
here. "That area was close to the visitor center, and we
wanted it to really be hands-on," Hamm says. The Portico
Group envisions gardens devoted to horticultural therapy, ecology,
biology, cultural influences, and landscape demonstration, each with
the central interpretive focuses of plant
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adaptation and
environmental change over time. Visitors can touch plants, try
their hand at propagating, pruning, and potting, discuss issues with
docents, and hopefully make connections between what they learn and
their own daily lives. The landscape demonstration garden also
would offer the opportunity for landscape architects, landscape
gardeners, and artists to compete in garden design competitions such
as the one held annually at Chaumont in France.
Past the visitor center and the Gardens of Exploration, five
Signature Plant Collections and Gardens await. Grouped into
Northern Hemisphere (California, Mediterranean Basin) and Southern
Hemisphere (Chile, South Africa, Australia), the collections are
separated by an "equator", a thick planting - composed of
trees and shrubs from all five regions - that traverses the site
from east to west. The Signature Collections range in size
from seven to forty-seven acres, each being large enough to
characterize the biogeographic zone to which is corresponds.
Because even forty-seven acres is not enough to illustrate an
entire climate zone, the team chose representative plants carefully,
with the help of Professor Emeritus Robert Ornduff, of UC Berkeley's
Botany Department, and David Fross, of Native Sons Nursery.
They looked for flora that told the biogeographic and cultural
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stories of a region, as well as those that would do well on this
particular site.
At the collections' edges, where there is
some geographic overlap, visitors can compare and contrast the
plants' characteristics.
The topography of the site lends itself to a variety of plant
associations in each region. The California Collection's
gardens range from mixed evergreen forest to chaparral to wetland to
an agave-yucca rise. On the Mediterranean Slope in the
Mediterranean Basin Collection, trees and shrubs of economic
importance join displays of culinary herbs. The Chilean
Collection's Araucaria Crest will create a forest of monkey puzzle
trees, while the Puya Palisades garden illustrates species
colonization and diversity within one genus.
The Southern Hemisphere offers its own fascinating examples of
mediterranean plants. The South African Collection sports a
cape succulents garden, with Cyphostemma juttae, a rotund bulbous
Star Wars-looking succulent, and the Fynbos Tapestry includes some
of the more than several hundred species of Erica found south of the
Limpopo River in South Africa. Western and south-western
Australia contribute the exotic Protea family - including Banksia,
Grevillea and Hakea - as well as the dramatic grass tree,
Xanthorrhoea quanrangulata.
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