Introduction

The New York Botanical Garden occupies 100 hectares (250 acres) in the north central portion of Bronx County, New York. The property is a public garden with the majority of the grounds under cultivation. The Thain Family Forest, margins of the Bronx River, rock outcrops and areas of undeveloped landscape are important refugia for spontaneous plants, both native and non-native.

The Garden was established in 1891 by an act of the State Legislature of New York to pursue a mission of botanical research, education, and horticulture. In 1895, founding director Nathaniel Lord Britton selected a 100-hectare site in the Bronx, New York’s northernmost borough, as the Garden’s location. Britton chose the site because it included a 20-hectare (50-acre) old-growth forest surrounded by fields with soils suitable for growing a diversity of plants to serve the Garden’s research and educational activities.

We are grateful to Jerry and Carol Bodian for their long-time service to the New York Botanical Garden and especially for their diligent and painstaking search of the William and Lynda Steere Herbarium for specimens of spontaneous plants collected on the grounds of the Garden and also for their assistance in the Digital Imaging Laboratory photographing specimens for the C. V. Starr Virtual Herbarium. We also thank the head curators of the Steere Herbarium, from Harold Rickett to Barbara Thiers, for their wise stewardship of this invaluable collection. Equally, we want to express our appreciation for the many librarians over the years who have been entrepreneurial collectors and custodians of vital botanical literature in the Garden’s LuEsther T. Mertz Library.