Botany Garden and Greenhouse Hours:
The Botany Greenhouse is open to the public M-F 8am to 4pm.
The Botany Greenhouse is located in Birge Hall at 430 Lincoln Dr., Madison, WI 53706. Please enter the greenhouse through the front doors of Birge Hall and follow the signs to the B2 level of Birge.
Botany Garden hours: sunrise to sundown. The Botany Garden is located at 1090 University Avenue.
ABOUT US
The Botany Garden and Greenhouses are living laboratories for teaching, research and outreach in Botany. Our primary mission is to enable and enhance teaching and research in Botany at the University of Wisconsin- Madison Department of Botany. Our living plant collections feature 2300 plant taxa from 220 families and provide students and visitors the opportunity to explore the vast diversity of plant life from habitats around the world. In addition to supporting critical teaching, research and outreach programs, the Botany Garden and Greenhouse is an aesthetic resource for students and the community.
The staff of the Botany Garden and Greenhouse work to fulfill this mission in myriad ways. We provide direct and indirect support for Botany and other UW courses by providing plants material to classes, hosting guided and unguided educational tours, providing horticultural guidance to students conducting class and individual research projects, and by directly mentoring students conducting independent study in staff areas of expertise. We facilitate faculty, staff and student research by providing space, materials, horticultural consultation and plant care services to researchers from the Department of Botany. Researchers from other UW-Madison Departments and other universities also coordinate with Botany Garden and Greenhouse staff to use plant materials from our extensive, world-class living collections. As a facility that is open to the public, we engage with visitors from campus and the community frequently and directly, and also participate in campus outreach events, allowing the public to experience and visit our living collections outside of normal business hours. In order to provide outstanding living plant collections for teaching, research and outreach to the Department of Botany, UW-Madison, and greater community, we provide exceptional horticultural care for thousands of plants. We provide employment and volunteer opportunities to students who make essential contributions to the fulfillment of our mission.
LIVING COLLECTIONS MANAGER
Cara Streekstra has been with the Botany Garden and Greenhouses for over 12 years, and is our Living Collections Manager. She obtained her bachelor’s degree in Botany here at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. Cara then gained 7 years of experience in production horticulture in Oregon before she returned to Madison to join our team. She is currently taking on the large effort of updating and formally databasing our living collection.
HORTICULTURE TECHNICIAN
Molly Campbell is our Horticulture Technician since August 2019. She brings over 10 years of professional horticulture experience to our team! Molly has been exploring many different aspects of greenhouse culture from GMO soybeans to organic herb and vegetable seedling production. Molly is responsible for the Integrated Pest Management in the Botany Greenhouse that we have been implementing for five years. She also provides our teaching assistants and teachers with plants needed to be grown for class instruction.
GARDENER
Nick Ruby is our permanent, part-time Horticulture Technician that helps in all ways possible to maintain both the garden and the greenhouse all year long. He has been with us for 6 years. Nick grew up in Verona around farming and crop production. He is becoming an expert in organic lawn care in the Botany Garden. He is also our resident aquatic plant and fish care leader for our excellent set of ponds and aquaria. Being around the soothing atmosphere of plants and part of the plant education is why he likes working here.
FORMER DIRECTOR
The former Director of the Botany Garden and Greenhouses of the UW Madison Botany Department is Dr. Ingrid Jordon-Thaden. She has taken a faculty position at Murray State University. Congratulations, Ingrid! She is an Omaha native that comes to us from a strong background of horticulture, taxonomy, and systematics of plant teaching and research. She received her bachelor degrees from University of Nebraska-Lincoln in Horticulture and Chemistry, then a masters of biology from UNL in corn biology. Her PhD in Plant Systematics and Biodiversity of Brassicaceae (mustard family) was obtained from the University of Heidelberg, Germany. She then continued her research in plant speciation at the University of Florida, University of California-Berkeley, and Bucknell University.
Please read this special message from Dr. Jordon-Thaden.
