Projects

This is the stuff that make Belize Botanic Gardens more than just a pretty place.

Education

There are only 8 of us on staff here at the gardens and we'd get awfully bored if we didn't get to talk to someone else. In fact everything we do has an education part to it. So we make our education program fit the bill for students of all ages and many different sciences. Preschoolers learning that you wear plants, tropical botany students dissecting a trumpet tree and everyone in between can enjoy lessons more when they are taught outdoors in Belize Botanic Gardens.

Collections

This is the heart of Belize Botanic Gardens. Our collections are all the plants you come to see and that we work with. We focus primarily on the flora of Belize but also display exotic plants from around the world's tropics. We target threatened Belizean plants as well as economically, botanically or horticulturally important species such as orchids, palms, cycads, bromeliads, passion flowers and hardwoods.

Sustainable Agriculture

Call us crazy, but at Belize Botanic Gardens we enjoy figuring out how to grow things without the use of pesticides or chemicals. It is more than just a past time we maintain our garden organically. We also devote a lot of our time to finding ways to grow plants in a way that farmers and nature benefit. This has been a major part of the work at BBG from the garden's beginnings.

We experiment with palms, fruits and hardwoods. Our largest project, funded by the Darwin Initiative, deals with palms called xate (shah-tay), little palms causing a big hullabaloo in Belize.

Technology

At Belize Botanic Gardens we research and develop software to help us manage our collections and biodiversity data. We are also strong believers in free and open source software. So far we have developed an application, called Bauble, to help us manage our live plant collections and we hope to contribute more to the open source and biodiversity communities in the future. For more information about Bauble see http://bauble.belizebotanic.org.