The garden's first incarnation, in 1890, was a modest collection near Haviland Hall on the north side of the Berkeley campus, established by E.L. Greene, the first chairman of the Botany Department, to preserve Pacific Coast native plants. A glasshouse conservatory modeled on London's Crystal Palace went up in 1894 for $16,000, housing palms and tropicals. Within two years, the collection had grown to six hundred species. But the campus was growing faster. By 1924, the conservatory was demolished to make room for parking and new buildings. The garden needed a new home. In 1925, Thomas Harper Goodspeed, the university's Dean of Agriculture and future garden director, oversaw the relocation to Strawberry Canyon in the Berkeley Hills. He chose the site for its microclimate - the air draft from the Golden Gate moderated temperatures and humidity, creating conditions he said were "not duplicated elsewhere in middle western California." The Civilian Conservation Corps arrived in 1933, and over 200 young men spent eight months building roads and dam infrastructure that would support the garden's expansion for decades.

Walk the garden's 34 acres and you cross the planet. The collections are organized geographically: South African proteas and aloes give way to Asian rhododendrons, then Australasian banksias and eucalyptus, then Mediterranean flora from Morocco to Syria on a hillside overlooking the Bay. The Deserts of the Americas section, started as a rock garden by James West in 1932, bristles with cacti and high-Andean succulents. The California Native section alone holds over 4,000 accessions, representing nearly half the state's native vascular plant species, including 174 taxa listed as rare or endangered. Berkeley researchers and paleontologists mounted expeditions to China, the Andes, South Africa, Bolivia, Peru, Mesoamerica, Australia, and New Zealand to build these collections. Nearly all outdoor specimens were collected in the wild, giving the garden a scientific weight that distinguishes it from purely ornamental spaces.

Behind the outdoor collections, the garden's greenhouses shelter the plants that cannot survive a Berkeley winter. The Arid House displays rotating exhibits of cacti and succulents. A dedicated house for ferns and carnivorous plants showcases insect-eating species alongside delicate fronds. The tropical house, renovated in 2024, features plants of economic value and curiosities like Amorphophallus, the giant corpse lily that draws crowds when it blooms and clears rooms with its stench. The numbers are staggering: more than 20,000 accessions across 324 plant families and 2,885 genera. The cactus collection alone contains 2,669 plants. There are 1,193 lilies, 1,151 sunflowers, 950 orchids, 897 ericas, and roughly 500 types of ferns. Chinese medicinal herbs, old rose cultivars, plants of economic importance - the garden is less a single collection than a library of the plant kingdom, organized for both beauty and research.

The garden's Asian plant collection dates to the early 1900s, when explorers like George Forrest and Joseph Rock gathered specimens from western China and Tibet. What makes the collection scientifically valuable is its comprehensive documentation of each plant's provenance - where it was found, when, and by whom. That documentation made the losses from a powerful Bay Area storm particularly painful. A colossal redwood tree toppled and crashed through the Asian section, destroying irreplaceable specimens. The top half of the garden's only Parana pine - a critically endangered species from Brazil - snapped off. A prized Queensland eucalyptus and a South African gum-leaf cone bush were also damaged. A team of experts converged on the hillside site to rescue what could be saved, motivated by the fact that many of these plants were originally sourced from the wild and could not simply be reordered from a nursery catalog.

After the 1939 Golden Gate International Exposition on Treasure Island closed, its Japanese exhibit was donated to the garden and relocated to Strawberry Canyon. The Japanese Pool, now over eighty years old, became home to the California newts and rough-skinned newts whose near-drowning in 2023 prompted that emergency fundraising campaign. The pool is a reminder that gardens are not static displays but living systems that require constant maintenance, adaptation, and occasionally, rescue. Today, roughly 250 volunteers help maintain the garden's collections, continuing a tradition of community support that began in 1976 when the Friends of the Botanical Garden was first established. From its perch in the Berkeley Hills, with views stretching across the Bay to San Francisco, the garden remains one of the most diverse plant collections in the United States - 34 acres where every continent's flora grows within walking distance, tended by people who understand that even a cracked pond can be a crisis worth solving.