Level IV

The U.S. National Arboretum is a 451-acre public garden and research facility located in northeast Washington, D.C.  Established by an act of Congress in 1927, the Arboretum’s mission is to enhance the economic, environmental, and aesthetic value of ornamental and landscape plants through long-term, multi-disciplinary research, conservation of genetic resources, and interpretive gardens and exhibits.  The Arboretum is home to 16 major gardens including the National Herb Garden, National Bonsai and Penjing Museum, National Boxwood Collection, and Gotelli Conifer Collection; research fields used for plant breeding and evaluation; non-cultivated woodlands and meadows; plant production facilities; a USDA-ARS seed bank; and a 800,000 specimen herbarium.

The woody plant collection at the National Arboretum includes over 6,100 accessions representing 1617 unique species.  Noteworthy plant holdings include wild-collected germplasm dating back to early 20^th century USDA Plant Introductions, and more recently, the Arboretum’s international collecting efforts, particularly as members of the Sino-American Botanical Expedition and the North America-China Plant Exploration Consortium.  Taxonomically significant collections include Acer, Buxus, Magnolia, Prunus, Quercus, and Rhododendron.  The Arboretum maintains type material for over 650 cultivars it has developed and released, and maintains an active plant breeding and introduction program on site and at satellite research facilities in Beltsville, MD and McMinnville, TN.  As a designated USDA-ARS Germplasm Repository, the National Arboretum is responsible for the conservation of woody landscape plants from around the world, and the living collections are made freely available to the public for research requests via GRIN-Global.

A nonprofit botanic garden established in 1959, Montgomery Botanical Center keeps living specimens from wild plant populations worldwide. Emphasizing palms and cycads, the population-based, documented, scientific collections are available for study in Montgomery's 120-acre botanical garden of exemplary design.Watch drone video

Westonbirt, The National Arboretum, is located in Gloucestershire, England, about a two hour drive west from London. The arboretum is a remarkable place for people to enjoy and learn about trees. Its combination of maturity, species diversity and landscape style make it one of the most extraordinary arboretums in the world with an iconic status in our tree and landscape heritage. The tree collection itself contains around 16,000 catalogued trees and shrubs from 3,000 plant taxa. There are also five National Plant Collections including Japanese maples, for which the arboretum is so well known.

The University of Hawai‘i at Mānoa is one of only 32 institutions nationwide to hold the distinction of being a land‐, sea‐, and space‐grant research institution, and the only university in the United States that owns and operates a botanical garden in a tropical rainforest.  The Harold L. Lyon Arboretum is located on 193 acres in upper Mānoa Valley, O‘ahu, and maintains a world‐renowned collection of more than 5,000 plant taxa primarily from Hawai‘i, and the sub‐tropical and tropical areas of the world.  The plant collections are diverse, and include living specimens that range from common to extremely rare in their native habitat, as well as tropical ornamentals and economically and culturally important crop plants.

National Tropical Botanical Garden is a nonprofit institution with four gardens and five preserves in the state of Hawaii and a garden in South Florida, encompassing nearly 2,000 acres. NTBG’s mission is to enrich life through discovery, scientific research, conservation, and education by perpetuating the survival of plants, ecosystems, and cultural knowledge of tropical regions.
 
NTBG’s vast living collections include species from the the Old and New World Tropics, and emphasize wild-collected plants of the Pacific Islands. Its palm collection includes 20 out of 24 taxa of the Hawaiian Pritchardia palm, the only palm endemic to the Hawaiian archipelago. The majority of these species are listed under the U.S. Endangered Species Act. The institution has created the most extensive collection of breadfruit (Artocarpus altilis) varieties in existence, including varieties that no longer exist in their islands of origin.
 
The institution has an established policy for the acquisition, documentation, curation, maintenance, and sharing of the living resources, and has adopted codes of conduct and principles regarding invasive species and access to genetic resources and benefit sharing.

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The Atlanta Botanical Garden is a 30-acre urban oasis located in the City of Atlanta’s Midtown neighborhood.  Established in 1976, the Garden has steadily grown into an internationally recognized institution with premier horticultural displays, popular year-round exhibitions, pioneering conservation research, and inspirational STEM enrichment education.  The Garden has an extraordinary living collection of more than 122,230 plants representing 11,660 taxa and 8,150 species that speaks directly to the Garden’s mission “to develop and maintain plant collections for display, research, conservation, education, and enjoyment.”   Its temperate climate ensures 12-month outdoor interest—from the displays of cacti, succulents, and carnivorous bog specimens in the sunny Skyline Garden to the shady Gardens in Storza Woods nestled in one of the oldest hardwood canopies in Atlanta.  Special attention is given to cultivating the Garden’s five Nationally Accredited Plant Collections: Magnolia, Acer, Sarracenia, Stanhopea, and Gongora. To expand upon and leverage this collections expertise, the Garden’s Conservation and Research team recently launched the Global Conservation Consortium for Magnolias, in partnership with Botanical Gardens Conservation International (BGCI). Complementing these efforts, the team was admitted into the International Union for Conservation of Nature (IUCN) in 2019 and joined the World Conservation Congress in 2020.

The Morton Arboretum is an internationally recognized nonprofit organization dedicated to the planting and conservation of trees. Its 1,700 acres hold collections of more than 4,000 kinds of trees, shrubs, and other plants from around the world.

Bedgebury National Pinetum is unique and important on a global scale for species conservation, scientific advancement and the understanding of conifers. The mix of conifers and broadleaved specimens contained in 350 acres of rolling Wealden countryside is awe-inspiring in its size and grandeur. Amongst these trees you will find the planet's largest living organism - the giant redwood or Wellingtonia (Sequoiadendron giganteum), and the tallest - the coast redwood (Sequoia sempervirens). Bedgebury holds 6 National Plant Collections - Chamaecyparis lawsoniana cultivars (cvs.); Cryptomeria japonica cvs.; × Cuprocyparis leylandii cvs.; Juniperus species (spp.); Taxus spp. & cvs. and Thuja cvs. Keeping these collections ensures that they are available for gardeners, nurserymen, researchers, and anyone interested in trees to benefit from as a resource alongside the expertise of the Bedgebury team in managing their care.

The scale and quality of Bedgebury Pinetum's conifer collection make it an ideal 'safe site' for the International Conifer Conservation Programme (ICCP) run by the Royal Botanic Gardens Edinburgh. A safe site for this programme is a botanic garden that grows plants collected in the wild, as seed or cuttings and where there is regular monitoring and biological data recorded. The ICCP aims to promote the conservation of conifers through in-situ conservation work, ex-situ conservation work, research and education. Bedgebury Pinetum plays a vital role in conserving the genetic diversity of conifers, particularly those from temperate rainforests.

The mission of the Arboretum is to create a living museum that enriches the quality of life by providing a place for the appreciation and study of plants and the preservation of the natural environment. Boone County Arboretum is funded and operated by the Boone County Cooperative Extension District, Boone County Fiscal Court, with additional fund raising and volunteerism support from the non-profit Friends of Boone County Arboretum.