Pink, purple, green lush overgrown plants and flowers hang over a cement path with large green trees on the side while in the far distance a person is standing.

Women’s History Month 2023

Wednesday, March 1, 2023 – Friday, March 31, 2023

Online & At the Garden

NYBG is proud to celebrate Women’s History Month to honor the lives and accomplishments of pioneers and trailblazers, researchers and innovators, activists and advocates, thought leaders and influencers, and many others. Throughout the month, we explore their consequential work that not only inspired and transformed NYBG but also contributed to important advancements in science, horticulture, and education that continue to inform environmental action and empower diverse communities.

Above: Ladies’ Border was originally designed in the early 1930s by pioneering landscape architect Ellen Shipman. This garden was named by NYBG’s Women’s Auxiliary Committee, a group of women who were instrumental in establishing many of the Garden’s most beautiful collections. In 2002 noted public garden designer and NYBG Trustee Lynden B. Miller redesigned the border as a display of unusual plants with a particular emphasis on those with winter and early spring interest, experimenting with plants not considered hardy in this region—an important effort that continues today.

Native Plant Garden Tour

At the Garden and on the Bloomberg Connects App

This interpretive tour in the Native Plant Garden highlights the notable contributions of pioneering botanist and NYBG co-founder Elizabeth Gertrude Knight Britton to native plant conservation and bryology, the study of mosses and their close relatives.

Image of a small waterfall in the Native Plant Garden in summer.

Plants as Liberation

In this wide-ranging series of interviews with herbalists, houseplant enthusiasts, farmers, and gardeners, hear from Black women in the plant world and learn how they are using plants as a powerful expression of liberation and freedom.

Leah Penniman

Maryah Greene

Rooted in Plants

Hear from our expert Teen Explainers as they profile the lives and work of two remarkable women:

Explore plant connections between the wetland ecology of the Everett Children’s Adventure Garden and Blackwater National Wildlife Refuge, the land where abolitionist Harriet Tubman (1822–1913) was formerly enslaved.

Learn about the important contributions of Janaki Ammal (1897–1984), the first woman from India to earn a doctorate in botany in America. Through her studies of plant breeding, she is credited with developing improvements for commercial plants to feed the Indian population and use her influence to preserve indigenous plants.

Rooted in Plants: Janaki Ammal

Rooted in Plants: Harriet Tubman

Inspiring Women, on Inspiring Topics

Crop Wild Relatives and the Role of Herbaria in Future Food Crop Security

Dr. Jessica B. Harris and the African American Garden at NYBG

Sowing Stories and Seeds