About Us

Bromeliad in Mayan Statue

As a non-for-profit botanic garden, we exist to serve as gardens and educational grounds for the Belizean community to enjoy and take advantage of, as well as a scientific resource and living germplasm for botanical and horticultural institutions world-wide. We have no stake-holders; we exist only through the visitation and generosity of the local community and international visitors.

Belize Botanic Gardens maintains a variety of collections and demonstration plots as well as five ecosystems of Belize. It takes nine full-time employees conducting a multitude of jobs, with the help of volunteers, to keep the garden running. Support and donations from visitors and loyal plant lovers helps us reach our project goals and annual budget.

If you want to know how BBG got started, please view our history.

Plants and People

There are millions of species of plants and animals on earth; millions of solutions and strategies for survival. Only a fraction have been described, and each species belongs to an intricate web with exponential interdependent species for survival. Plants have provided us with limitless utilitarian services: food, housing, medicine, clothing... But there are unquantifiable ecosystem services they provide for us that make our climate and environment habitable for human life since the beginning of our existence: oxygen, air and water purification, soil stabilization, habitat for countless other species of aesthetic or utilitarian value.

Plants rely on their relationships with other plants, animals, fungi, viruses, bacteria and protists to maintain healthy populations. These combinations form ecosystems and perform the functions that maintain the balance of life on earth.

The amount of biodiversity, the collective variety of all life on earth, is directly proportional to the wellbeing for mankind.

Inevitably, every species of plant can provide man with aesthetic beauty or intricacy, from the seemingly noxious but nutritious dandelion to the malodorous & magnificent Rafflesia arnoldii as champion of the largest flowering plant on earth. All flora are inherently valuable regardless of reward or profit.

Belize Botanic Gardens hopes to inspire all our visitors to appreciate plants to consider plants in your daily routines and responsibly steward nature as it provides for us.