Photo of a Saw Whet Owl taken by my friend and photographer, Kim DeGooyer, in New Hampshire.
I once heard the leader of a major public garden sum up a strategic challenge in four words: “We have an owl problem.”
Owl?
“Old white ladies.”
Ouch. As a garden lover who will fit that description sooner rather than later (and may already), it pinched a little. But the line stayed with me, because underneath the quip is a quandary: why don’t gardens hold a bigger place in the culture?
The owls are not the wrong audience. They are the loyalists that keep many gardens running, as members, volunteers and donors. The risk is that a garden whose audience is aging in place has a future that is aging in place too.
Gardens are designed to be a balm, and we all need one. But calm is not the same as quiet. When editors and culture writers scan for what deserves our attention, they cover film, podcasts, museums, galleries, books, theatre and ideas festivals. Almost always missing from the list: horticulture.
That is strange, because gardens are living art fused with science, climate and community. Some of the boldest thinking anywhere is happening in planting design, ecological garden care, biodiversity and how people and wildlife share space. Many gardens already program performances, installations and talks. The ideas are there. The cultural standing is… getting there.
Flip the question
The gardens breaking through have flipped a basic question. Instead of asking “How do we bring people to our garden?” they ask “How do we bring our garden to people?” And they answer it by working on a problem people already care about. The coverage follows.
A river, replanted.
After the July 4, 2025 floods tore through Texas Hill Country, the San Antonio Botanical Garden launched TREES, a five-year coalition effort to plant 50,000 native trees along the Guadalupe River. The work earned a feature in Texas Monthly and a $3 million grant from the Community Foundation of the Texas Hill Country, and most of the first plantings survived a second flood this July. This is a garden acting as climate infrastructure, and as a place for a grieving region to put its hands in the soil.
An ICU under the sky.
In May, King’s College Hospital in London opened the UK’s first outdoor Critical Care Roof Garden, fifteen years in the making. Up to six intensive care patients at a time can be treated in fresh air, among fragrant and tactile planting, without being disconnected from life support. Designed by Nigel Dunnett and Sarah Price, it doubles as a research site: clinicians will study whether daylight and greenery ease the stress and delirium of long ICU stays. It is not a public garden in the usual sense. It is proof of what horticulture can do when matched with creative vision and tenacity to show up where its needed most.
A garden on the commute.
The Atlanta Botanical Garden’s $165 million Garden Gateway expansion adds nearly eight acres and will make it the first major cultural institution with direct access to the 22-mile Atlanta Beltline. Its leadership has said the goal is to be to the Beltline what the Whitney is to New York’s High Line, itself proof that a planting design can become a global destination. Rather than waiting for visitors, the garden is moving to where people already walk.
A cemetery that became a cultural venue.
Here in the New York metro, Green-Wood in Brooklyn is 478 acres of landscape founded in 1838. It is a leader in stormwater management, diverting an estimated 51 million gallons of runoff a year from the city’s sewers, along with biodiversity and native planting. It also programs art installations and live performances with some of the leading artists working today. If a burial ground can become one of the more interesting cultural venues in New York, what is stopping the rest of us?
What they have in common
None of these began as an audience development campaign. Each began with a garden deciding its expertise mattered to a problem beyond its gates: a flooded river, an intensive care unit, a city’s daily movement, an overwhelmed sewer system. Relevance followed the work, new audiences followed the relevance.
That is the uncomfortable part for those of us who lead and support gardens. Relevance is not a communications problem to solve after the programming is set. It is a question about what we choose to work on.
A cultural relevance score
I have been developing a cultural relevance score for public gardens: a diagnostic to help leadership teams see what their garden contributes to its community and to society, and to answer the question every editor, reader and visitor is silently asking: why should I care?
A few of the questions it asks: Does our work show up in conversations that are not about horticulture? Where is our garden’s impact beyond its gates? Would a mainstream publication or content creator have a reason to write about us this year?
More of this, please
Back to the owls. They are not the problem. They found gardens long ago and stayed. The problem is that the rest of the culture has not been given a reason to consider. The gardens above have.
More of this, please.
