Continuing Education at the Botanic Gardens of New York City

New York City's two major botanical gardens - The Brooklyn Botanic Gardens and The New York Botanic Gardens (located in the Bronx) both offer a significant range of continuing education classes for those interested in every aspect of plants. Some courses at these botanic gardens of New York City can even be taken for college credit and several certificate programs are also available. Topics covered in the courses at the botanic gardens include everything from flower arranging to the proper preparation of herbal remedies.

At the Brooklyn Botanic Gardens certificate programs are offered in both horticulture and floral design. The New York Botanic Gardens offers certificate programs in botanical art and illustration, floral design, horticulture, botany, gardening, horticultural therapy, and landscape design.

In general, the course offerings at the New York Botanic Gardens are more scientific and/or practical in nature (i.e., how to identify types of mushrooms, how to make herbal tinctures of cosmetics, understanding the growth cycles of plants, etc.), whereas those at the Brooklyn Botanic Gardens have a stronger focus on the aesthetic appreciation of plants and the surrounding environment (i.e., classes on watercolor painting and bird watching)..

Both New York City botanic gardens offer a full schedule of recent and upcoming classes on their websites and you can also get a paper or email version of their catalogues. Courses range from costing little more than $20 (for a one time, no materials intensive) to hundreds (a course meeting with weekly sessions) and some, those that may be taken for college credit or the certificate programs are graded. To accommodate a wide range of schedules, most classes have more than one section - so whether daytime or evening and weekend meetings are better for you should not prevent you from exploring the world of plants. Additionally, as counter-intuitive as it might seem to you if you are new to the world of plant sciences, both New York City botanic gardens and their education programs run year round. In fact, the New York Botanic Gardens even offers a series of plant identification courses focusing on the plants of each season.

Classes at both New York City botanic gardens do require advance registration and can be done by phone, paper mail or fax (there is, at this time, no way to truly register online). Generally registrations at the botanic gardens are accepted as long as space in the class remains. If you need to cancel, refund policies do differ depending on the course and its location.

Faculty at the New York City botanic gardens classes come from botanic gardens staff as well as well respected experts and academics in their fields who may only be loosely affiliated with the botanic gardens in question.

Living in New York City, it is easy to overlook one's opportunities to explore nature, but as both the New York Botanic Gardens and the Brooklyn Botanic Gardens are easily accessible by public transit there is no reason not to explore your love of the outdoors and plant related hobbies and sciences even if you live in a high-rise.