A healing place: Reimagining the modern botanic garden as a physic garden

Abstract

I have long promoted botanic gardens as a potent mix of nature, culture and science. Triggered by the COVID‐19 pandemic and the community's changing relationship with outdoor spaces, I want to add another vital element: the botanic garden as a reimagined physic garden. Not just a collection of medicinal plants, but a healing place. The value of nature, of gardens, and particularly of botanic gardens, for keeping us in “good health” is, if not self‐evident, then progressively confirmed by social research. The modern botanic garden as a physic garden embraces the creation and further development of botanic gardens in places where there are more people than “natural” diversity of plants; encourages a medical approach to addressing complex problems like climate change—targeting the root causes first, curing if possible, or if not, relieving symptoms and build resistance; favors a triaging approach to conservation for more effective use of resources; and provides plant rescue and restoration as the equivalent of a human Intensive Care Unit, with “plant ambulances” dispatched after natural (including human‐induced) disasters. Our landscapes and collections are for many their first contact with a complex plant environment—nature. That contact is also good for our health.