Nature Gardens Wins Award
Distinguished for its home-grown organic gardening practices that eschew pesticides, our museum lets plants and insects co-exist.
Our four-acre botanical wonderland that rings around the museum has just been awarded a Green Grounds Certification by Re:wild Your Campus, marking a historic milestone. NHM is the first museum in the nation to receive this designation!
The Nature Gardens is meticulously maintained by a team of museum horticulturists. With a fully organic land care program, NHM demonstrates that a highly visited, public-facing landscape can be cared for in ways that protect people, pollinators, and the planet.
Our award-winning garden, completed in 2013 as part of a museum transformation to celebrate its 100th birthday, features 630 species of native and nonnative plants (about 380 are endemic to California) that mirror the SoCal semi-arid Mediterranean climate. The verdant and varied space, with a pollinator garden, a bird-viewing platform, a pond, and edible garden, was an inspired collaboration between NHM scientists and landscape architects, Studio-MLA, who selected the greenery to be magnets for wildlife.
“We have managed our garden without synthetic pesticides from day one,” says Senior Manager of Horticulture Daniel Feldman. “We’re excited to get the word out about the success of our practices for the past 10 years and share that you can have a thriving garden without using pesticides. We are hoping to educate and share with other institutions that might follow our lead.”
A Happy Place for Plant-eaters
Irene Eppard
Sphinx moth larva eating a Clarkia flower
Irene Eppard
Buckeye caterpillars devouring island snapdragon. "This demonstrates a host plant relationship but it could be seen as a pest as it was devouring new plants," says Feldman. "Yet this is a somewhat rare butterfly, at least for our gardens! So pest is not the term I would use for it. We let them eat the plants up."
Irene Eppard
Wooly oak galls on Englemann oak
Irene Eppard
Aphids on narrow leaf milkweed, which could be seen as a pest.
Smart about Soil
Re:wild lauded the museum’s horticulture team, led by Feldman, for managing its small lawn areas with only occasional aeration, overseeding, and organic topdressing, and the team produces its own compost onsite to enrich soil throughout the gardens. Mulch is applied generously to support soil microbial activity and reduce water needs. The museum has also been a long-standing adopter of environmentally responsible landscape technology; for more than a decade, staff have relied exclusively on battery-powered equipment, aligning naturally with California’s phaseout of gas-powered small engines.
The gardeners continue to expand the use of native and drought-tolerant plants and employ a weather-based irrigation system and a combination of low-flow spray heads and drip irrigation, which are monitored closely and repaired quickly whenever issues arise. Together, these practices ensure that the museum’s landscape remains both water-efficient and biologically rich.
Irene Eppard
Praying mantis in the garden
Irene Eppard
A hummingbird feeding on Lantana
Irene Eppard
Monarch butterfly nectaring on Lantana
Protecting birds, insects, and other wild creatures is baked into the museum’s conservation philosophy. “Organic pesticides [such as oils and soaps] are derived from plants and natural sources but we very rarely use them because they aren't targeting one species—they take out the pest and any beneficial insects.” Even organics have been known to harm bee communities.
As a contrast, he points out that botanical gardens are focused on conserving and preserving plants rather than having a living ecosystem: “For us, wildlife support and immersing people in that environment is number one,” he said. “If it means the plant is getting eaten for that to occur, that’s OK with us.”
Come visit our Nature Gardens and meet your wild neighbors!
To learn more about Green Grounds Certification, click here.
