Cambridge University Botanic Garden Living Collections Strategy

The Living Collections Strategy is a rigorous, in-depth analysis of the plants that the Garden holds across its 40-acre landscape and form the University of Cambridge’s Living Collections.

Produced by the Botanic Garden’s Curator, Dr Sam Brockington, the Living Collections Strategy looks forward from 2020 and asks how our Living Collections can continue to safeguard the world’s plant diversity within the wider global botanic garden network, while also driving the pursuit of excellence in research and teaching to help solve some of the world’s greatest issues such as climate change, food security and the production of medicines.

Sam explains: “This Living Collection Strategy puts plant diversity and wild-collected plant material at the top of our agenda, as we believe this is crucial to supporting world-class research both in Cambridge and around the globe. It is this cutting-edge plant research that aims to solve today’s global challenges, which are impacting on people and societies around the world.

“Plants are crucial to the existence of all life on earth. Having open and easy access to carefully curated, and strategically-planned, collections of rare, wild and diverse plant material will assist plant scientists’ understanding of plants and the mechanisms they use to thrive and survive. This is vital not just for research but also for education and conservation purposes, which are also at the heart of this Collections Strategy.”

Sam continues: “Our 2020-2030 Collections Strategy comes at a critical time when we face ever-pressing global challenges. It is a comprehensive analysis of where we are at now and where we want to be in 10 years’ time. We’ve couched this analysis in terms of not just what we’re doing, but what the entire global network of botanic gardens are achieving, in order to best position ourselves, to collaborate within that network, but also to differentiate ourselves and to make our collections unique.”

The Living Collections strategy seeks to improve the quality of the Garden’s collections and their management.

CUBG’s Director, Professor Beverley Glover, adds: “Our Living Collections Strategy is an important document for the Garden. It analyses the ‘now’ and directs us into the future, mapping out how we intend to implement this strategy and best deliver on our aims of research, education and conservation. We already provide a living laboratory and classroom to University researchers and students, Higher Education institutions, primary and secondary schools and adult learners. Our intention now is to make this offer more accessible world-wide, while remaining an inspiring and wonderful place for over 300,000 annual visitors and families.”

“This strategy will ensure that we deliver on all the different roles we as a botanic garden play, and that we do this using our wonderful collection of plants and providing it in a beautiful and inspiring way.”

• sets out and measures the quality of the collections according to a number of values: rarity, diversity, wild origin, extinction risk, seed banking, provenance, duplication, longevity and sustainability, exceptional interest.
• asks key questions about strengths and weaknesses across the collections, and the landscape as a whole.
• explores how our collections are currently used to support planning for their future use.
• looks to the future to support CUBG’s three main objectives of Research, Education and Conservation.
• outlines how we intend to improve the contents of the collections.
• considers how to best manage the existing collection to ensure CUBG is best positioned to support world-class research and teaching – within Cambridge and beyond.

• what Living Collections we hold, and their quality
• how we can increase the value of the Living Collections through the collection and acquisition of new material.
• what aspects of them we need to prioritise in support of CUBG’s three core objectives: Research, Education, Conservation.
• how we can improve and develop our management and procedures to better serve the Living Collections and deliver our core objectives.

• by making them more diverse – more families, more species from key genera, more British native species.
• more representation for early diverging land plant lineages.
• collect more material from Temperate South America, South Africa, the Balkans and Central Asia.
• collect more wild-collected species and their provenance data.
• less duplication and more rare plants.
• more sustainability and longevity of key species.

CUBG is one of the largest university-owned botanic gardens in the world, and supports one of the largest concentrations of plant scientists anywhere in the world.

Its plant collection of over 8,000 species, which includes iconic and endangered trees and plants, is spread across 40 acres of landscaped gardens, supporting world-class university research and teaching towards meeting many of the world’s great future challenges, as well as being a ‘living classroom’ and inspirational resource for schools, the local community and visitors from around the world, showcasing the natural world, plant science and horticulture.

This Living Collections Strategy is a blueprint to ensure a stronger alignment with Cambridge University’s pursuit of education, learning and research at the highest levels of international excellence and comes at a time when conservation and sustainability both within the University as well as in the global arena, is considered of utmost importance.