If a plant has ever died in your care, you’re in good company. It turns out that even in the world’s botanical gardens, managed by full-time professionals, plants don’t live forever—the median lifespan is just 15 years. That’s just one of the insights provided by a recent global study that analyzed a century’s worth of plant records from fifty botanical collections around the world, including those from both the Cleveland Botanical Garden and the Holden Arboretum.

The other findings of the new study, led by researchers at Cambridge University, have important implications for global plant conservation—and plant deaths in gardens are among the least of their worries. Their results suggest that the world’s collections are at peak capacity, and are facing a number of barriers when it comes to conserving the world’s plant diversity, something they eagerly want to do.

Read more about the research, from Cambridge University:
Botanic Gardens must team up to save wild plants from extinction

But in addition to the heavy research findings, the study, published in Nature Ecology & Evolution earlier this year, is a testament to the power of record-keeping and other quiet work that happens behind the scenes to track and document plants at public gardens like the Holden Arboretum and the Cleveland Botanical Garden. If there’s one person who knows just how important that work is, it’s Ethan Johnson, plant records curator at Holden Forests & Gardens.

“There’s a whole community of sister gardens throughout the world, doing similar work,” Johnson says. “It’s very helpful to have someone pull all the data together, like the folks at Cambridge did—it was great to get the results back.” 

Why Records Matter

Record-keeping might sound tedious, but in reality, doing the task well requires ongoing innovation. “Every time we provide data to somebody, we find things that we could improve about our records,” Johnson says. That’s not a commentary on the quality of the records, but a testament to his dedication to the cause. Johnson’s constant improvement of the records is why HF&G was able to contribute such useful data to this major research effort.

Keeping records is an important facet of the mission of public gardens like HF&G’s. These plant collections serve a bigger purpose, doing important work in conservation, research, and education. None of it can happen effectively without a foundation of data, and keeping research-grade records requires buy-in from everyone involved. With new plants coming in all the time, year after year, it can be a big ask. “You’ve got to have everybody on board to report as soon as they get something new in,” Johnson explains. “It’s so much easier to get the information right away than decades after the fact.”

The Evolution of Record-Keeping

Today, the job of tracking plants looks a lot different than it did in the past. When Johnson started his career, everything was done by hand. “When I first came here as an intern in 1981, there were no computers to be had,” he says. “The data was all on file cards and typed into accession books. We would make duplicates and store them in another building, just in case one burned down.”

It was a huge effort to digitize everything in the intervening decades. Everything is digital now, but that doesn’t mean it’s any easier. Plant records contain a staggering amount of detail: where a plant came from, its taxonomy, its wild origin (if known), and even changes in its scientific name over time. “There are maybe 200 fields, and we fill them all out for every plant,” Johnson says. “There is a lot of detail that goes into the records to try to make them useful.” 

Global Efforts, Global Challenges

The study HF&G contributed to revealed some fascinating trends. Plant collections around the world seem to have hit their ‘carrying capacity’—there’s only so much space, time, and resources to maintain living plant collections, and gardens have to make tough decisions about what to grow and preserve. That’s a problem when only an estimated 30% of the world’s plant species are represented in collections, and 20% (and counting) of the world’s plants are at risk of extinction. Only a tiny proportion of these threatened species are already in collections, and the pace at which new species are becoming threatened far surpasses the rate at which new species are added to collections.  

Another major hurdle was revealed to be The Convention on Biological Diversity (CBD), which changed how plants can be collected and shared internationally starting in 1993. The global agreement was designed to protect countries from what’s called ‘bioprospecting’—the exploitation of plants for commercial gain without compensation—which has been historically a problem particularly in the Global South. A major effect of the CBD was to reduce the international exchange of plants by 38%, the study found. For better or worse, the CBD has made it significantly harder for gardens to acquire plants from other countries.

“It had the best of intentions,” Johnson explains. “But what it’s really done is hinder our ability to conserve.” Now, many botanical gardens focus on growing native species and supporting conservation efforts within the plants’ home countries, rather than bringing plants to new regions. Native plants, of course, are worthy of protection, but on a global scale, this tips the balance toward mostly preserving plants that come from countries with botanical gardens, which are disproportionately in the Global North.

Looking to the Future

Despite the challenges, Johnson remains optimistic. He sees botanical record-keeping not just as a way to document the past, but as a tool for shaping the future. “The promise of computerized records is that you can make sense of what you’ve been doing,” he says. “And then you have a better idea of what you want to do in the future.”

As for HF&G, we’re working on a major initiative to make our plant records more accessible—not just to researchers, but to the public. Soon, visitors may be able to explore plant records at their fingertips, deepening their connection to the collections in new ways. 

“It’s just a very stimulating place,” Johnson says of HF&G. “You can never be bored with it.”

And thanks to people like Johnson—and the detailed records he keeps—botanical gardens will continue to be living libraries, preserving plants, knowledge, and history for generations to come.