New York Botanical Garden

This guide to the New York Botanical Garden follows Nathaniel and Elizabeth Britton, two botanists whose 1888 research trip to London's Kew Gardens left Elizabeth asking why New York had nothing like it. It covers the campaign she launched before the Torrey Botanical Club, the two hundred fifty thousand dollars she helped raise by sheer persistence, and the old-growth forest that led the founders to pick this particular fifty-acre site in 1895.