UBC Botanical Garden is Canada’s oldest university botanic garden, established in 1916 under the directorship of John Davidson, British Columbia’s first provincial botanist. The original mission of the garden was research into the native flora of British Columbia. Over the past 100 years, the mission of UBC Botanical Garden has broadened to include education, research, conservation, community outreach, and public display of temperate plants from around the world.

As Canada’s oldest university botanical garden, we steward a living and growing repository of plants representing the biodiversity of selected native and exotic temperate ecosystems. The total collection of approximately 120,000 accessioned plants represents some 6,000 taxa and includes significant collections of Magnolia, Acer (maples), Sorbus (mountain ash, Styracaceae (storax family), Rhododendron and climbing plants. A key part of the University’s biodiversity collections, the Botanical Garden provides resources to researchers, students and the public that reach far beyond its collections to provide a window onto the species, ecosystems and genetic diversity of the natural world.