Queens Botanical Garden

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A Flushing resource celebrating botanical and cultural diversity and sustainability

Place Details

Place Matters Profile

With its origins in the five-acre “Gardens on Parade” exhibit in Flushing Meadow Park at the 1939 World’s Fair, Queens Botanical Garden has served generations of New Yorkers seeking respite from the hustle and bustle of the urban landscape. Now in its forty-ninth year at Kissena Corridor Park, the Garden encompasses an impressive thirty-nine acres, and while it still provides relief from the hustle, the property is perhaps more bustling than ever.


Conceived in 1935 at the height of the Depression, the 1939 New York World’s Fair was to be the first international exposition showcasing the future. A promotional vehicle for aesthetic Modernism, industrial design and corporate ideology, the fair and its exhibits were also intended to lift the nation’s spirits and provide a hopeful glimpse into the “World of Tomorrow.” During planning for the fair, New York City Department of Parks Commissioner Robert Moses stole a look into the City’s future and saw an opportunity. He banned the 1939

With its origins in the five-acre “Gardens on Parade” exhibit in Flushing Meadow Park at the 1939 World’s Fair, Queens Botanical Garden has served generations of New Yorkers seeking respite from the hustle and bustle of the urban landscape. Now in its forty-ninth year at Kissena Corridor Park, the Garden encompasses an impressive thirty-nine acres, and while it still provides relief from the hustle, the property is perhaps more bustling than ever.


Conceived in 1935 at the height of the Depression, the 1939 New York World’s Fair was to be the first international exposition showcasing the future. A promotional vehicle for aesthetic Modernism, industrial design and corporate ideology, the fair and its exhibits were also intended to lift the nation’s spirits and provide a hopeful glimpse into the “World of Tomorrow.” During planning for the fair, New York City Department of Parks Commissioner Robert Moses stole a look into the City’s future and saw an opportunity. He banned the 1939 World’s Fair Corporation from staging its massive showcase in an existing city park, and instead required them to build on a new site. The Corporation thus transformed the swampy environs of the Corona Ash Dumps into Flushing Meadow Park, a fantastic public amenity, which Moses and the City’s Department of Parks and Recreation happily inherited after the fair closed in 1940.

With significant help from Queens-based volunteers, the City maintained the “Gardens on Parade” displays until 1948, when Moses transferred the plots to the newly incorporated Queens Botanical Garden Society. A month before the official June 1948 rebirth of the exhibit site as Queens Botanical Garden, the Society’s high aspirations were noted in the New York Times, which concluded that the agency “organized not as a botanical society concerned with rare plants, but as a horticultural organization concerned with providing assistance and useful information on garden problems to home owners.” Through demonstration plantings of small backyard gardens, the Society hoped that Queens Botanical Garden would illustrate best practices for working with local soil and climate conditions, and for sustaining and beautifying the borough. The Society also advocated for the development of Freedom Gardens, successors to wartime Victory Gardens, so that “if such a movement were to become nation-wide, this country would have more of the produce of its farms to share with the nations of the world.” Speaking at opening day before 350 audience members and more than 8,000 roses, Moses promised that the Garden would be a great asset to the people of Queens.

Over the years, Moses’ prediction has come true. In anticipation of the 1964 World’s Fair and construction of the Van Wyck Expressway Extension, the Garden was relocated to a 24-acre section of Kissena Corridor Park, just outside of the northeast corner of the renamed Flushing Meadows-Corona Park. The organization has flourished in its second location, where it has indeed taken root as a significant and permanent Queens asset. As of 2013, the Garden includes 18 acres of the formal botanical collections that you might expect, as well as 21 acres of uncultivated wetlands, orchards and woodlands.

Through the decades, Queens Botanical Garden has upheld the Society’s original didactic mission. The organizations’ strong emphasis on environmental stewardship and education is exemplified in the Visitor and Administration Building, which was completed in 2007 as New York City’s first LEED Platinum-rated building. Executive Director Susan Lacerte joined Queens Botanical Garden in 1994, and spearheaded the multiphase master planning and capital campaign that produced the award-winning structure. “We wanted to something that was very visible, because seeing is believing, and we’re a public institution.” Because the Garden is on city-owned land, the City’s Department of Design and Construction managed the project and provided a list of city-approved architects for the job. Lacerte says that she and the Garden’s Board of Directors chose Joan Krevlin of BKSK Architects because Krevlin understood their mission as a public institution. “You could tell by looking at her past materials that she understood that what we wanted to do was show the public, not just build a building.”

The collaboration yielded a two-story edifice nearly four times the size of the previous headquarters, which includes administrative offices, meeting rooms, a reception area and a gallery space. The linear wood and glass clad-structure is a narrow one-bay wide, and features low internal partitions, a design that allows natural light to reach all corners of the interior. Pioneering sustainable elements include photovoltaic panels to harness sun's energy, and a geo-thermal system that uses the earth's constant temperature to provide seasonal heating and cooling. The building features composting toilets and reuses gray water for flushing toilets; vermacomposting- composting with worms- turns lunch leftovers into fertilizer. More than a quarter of the building materials, by cost, came from within 500 miles of the site.

The center’s ground floor auditorium is tucked under a sloping green roof that wraps around the back of the structure and culminates in an front canopy which sends an artful cascade of water around the visitors’ entrance on rainy days. Because the Garden is sited above Mill Creek, a buried branch of the Flushing River, the property is endowed with an overabundance of water. Such soggy conditions could have been a curse, but the master plan included the prairie grass-insulated green roof, which acts like a sponge to reduce runoff, and numerous bioswales - gullies that prevent water from puddling by channeling it back into the soil. Together, these elements efficiently manage storm water on property and turn it into an advantage. The Garden also took the opportunity to use the water as a central theme. “Water is a powerful metaphor,” Lacerte says. “Water is so important to all life, it’s so important to people, it’s important to culture. You go to the watering hole, you go to the well, to the lake or the river. Wherever there’s water, there’s people. So we decided that we would use water as a unifying element for the whole project. And quite honestly, it’s where community happens.”

Even after 65 years, the Garden staff still takes their founders’ emphasis on community to heart. Numerous outreach initiatives include a Green Jobs training program that has provided workforce development for 285 long-term unemployed individuals, a heavy concentration of whom live in Queens. The program is free to participants, and has an impressive 65 percent placement rate. The Garden is a Second-Chance site for nonviolent offenders who are placed there through the District Attorney’s office. The organization also recently launched a therapeutic butterfly garden program for special needs students. Creating this habitat will also benefit the dwindling monarch butterfly population, which passes through New York en route to and from Mexico.

Queens Botanical Garden was born and raised in what is now one of the most ethnically diverse counties in the nation. Their slogan, “the place where people, plants and cultures meet,” adopted in 1997, affirms their commitment to honoring the needs and interests of surrounding Queens communities. These sentiments are more than lip service. In 2012, staff member Maureen Regan inaugurated the Intergenerational Garden & Food Pantry Project, where life-long horticulturalists assist the greenest of gardeners in tending to edibles selected specifically for their relevance to the culinary traditions of local immigrant communities.

According Regan, “our work in the Intergenerational Garden is really cultural, which makes it easy to connect with the neighbors.” Likely the first of its kind, the initiative includes members between the ages of 25 and 94, and yields between 125 and 150 pounds of food each week from April and November. The produce goes to area food pantries, as well as temples and churches that run soup kitchens or cooking programs for the community. They also grow flowers for area temples and other places of worship. Regan explains, “You know at the Sikh Temple they cook 24 hours a day for the community. You can just go in and have a meal, and you don’t have to be Sikh. I try to distribute food to as many places like that as possible.”

Regan says, “I’m very local. The food pantry harvest doesn’t go to Brooklyn or Manhattan or the Bronx. It’s Queens-based, because Queens doesn’t get a lot of visibility, but there’s alot poverty right here. So this is food for gardeners’ own tables, but it’s also addressing a social problem. And I decide which food to grow based on where it’s going in the community. For example, last year we had spinach from India, so it went to some parts of the South Asian community. Different vegetables are based on what the community needs. This year I started ginger indoors, and ginger is going to be really welcomed by the East Asian and Indian communities here. I also found out today that the Albanians love it! I want to combine that with chili peppers, because you can make different pastes with it. It’s just ginger you can find in the supermarket, so at the same time, we’re teaching the gardeners they can grow things that they could buy in the store-- grow it and multiply it!”

Lacerte, who has degrees in both environmental horticulture and public administration, interned at Queens Botanical Garden in 1984. She shares Regan’s enthusiasm for cultivation as a source for inspiration. “I come from a gardening background and I love plants. I just love plants! When I was in junior high Euell Gibbons published Stalking the Wild Asparagus. Granola hit the scene. It was the return-to-nature movement, which wasn’t really well known yet, but Gibbons was like the poster child for that. He would go out and look for plants. And I wanted to do that! I loved the stories of plant exploration. Like rubber. How somebody accidentally discovered that when it fell on a heat source it vulcanized – that’s how rubber gets rubbery. And quinine. Malaria was such a big problem, and they discovered that the bark of the cinchona tree helped to clear it. Peppercorns used to be currency, just like wampum. Those stories just fascinated me!”

For Lacerte, Regan and the rest of the Queens Botanical Garden family, discovery is a two-way street. In 2000 and 2001 they undertook a multilingual survey to get to know their audience better. They also formed the Ambassador Program through which they work with members of local ethnic groups who identify their communities’ needs to the Garden, and speak to their communities on behalf of the Garden. Through this program, the Garden has met with community leaders, held community focus groups and invited the various cultural groups to participate in Garden programming. The Korean community regularly curates a night in honor of cosmos, the flower that symbolizes autumn. Every morning, between 100 and 200 individuals gather to practice tai chi. The Garden’s work with the Ambassadors has led to a web-based ethnographic study of some of the plant-related cultural traditions observed in the borough. The site includes articles on traditional Chinese medicine; Vietnamese New Year; the Food Traditions of Greece; the Spices, Celebration and Roots of Indonesia in Queens; and the Diversity of the Philippines in Queens.

Lacerte says that the cultural outreach has made the Garden wiser. “I love the cultural stuff, but culture doesn’t sell everywhere. I just believe it in my heart and soul, just like plants inspire me. You know Olmsted and Vaux? They talked about public parks being the great equalizers of society. Democracy. Where people of all different socio-economic and cultural groups could observe and be around each other. I think places like this are just really good for society. When you’re in rural areas you have to beat back the forest to get to your house. But here in the city there’s a different focus on nature.The bud just pushing forth- I think it’s very powerful. It's just tranformative.”

Nominations

The Queens Botanical Garden is a beautiful lesson in botany, and a place to learn about all forms of nature. It also offers an eco-friendly event space. It matters because it is an awesome resource for the Queens community. I had my televised wedding there, and it is irreplaceable!

(May 2011)

It's quite the magical place. It was born out of the 1930's World's Fair in Flushing Meadows' Corona Park. The garden holds a breadth of Queens culture and diversity, and it adds a very important element to the borough. It's lush gardens are sincerely robust with greenery, and it offers community facilities as well as educational training and workshops, all of which are centered in the busy neighborhood of Flushing.

(May 2011)

Queens Botanical Garden is quite a beautiful garden refuge that many of the local Flushing residents visit everyday to escape from the fast pace outside of its gates. Hundreds of school groups take advantage of the great educational programs the garden has to offer. Visitors can explore both environmental sustainability and beauty in nature. Even though it's only thirty-nine acres, a lot of wildlife call the garden home, including the red tailed hawk, groundhogs, chipmunks, pheasants, lizards, honey bees, and many other living creatures. It features more than twenty gardens, and a LEED platinum visitor and administration center. Unfortunately, the garden is threatened by severe city funding cuts, which compound the already broad cuts experienced over the last three years, which have resulted in layoffs.

(May 2011)

A public botanical garden in the midst of the one of the most diverse populations in the United States. The garden receives over 166,000 visitors annually, and 16,000 children have enrolled in its workshops. It offers acres of cultivated land, and a new award winning administration building. Extremely harmful New York City budget cuts have reduced staff and hurt the garden in recent years and there may be more cuts to come in the future.

(May 2011)