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History of the UCR Botanic Gardens
The Origins
With the establishment of the College of Letters and Science in 1954 on the Riverside campus of the University of California, the need for a botanic garden was evident from the beginning. Among the first to join the staff of the new college was Professor Victor H. Goodman, a botanist. Faced with the prospect of teaching botany, he was concerned to find how little he knew about the flora of the West, and the Riverside area in particular. Having been raised in Missouri and educated at Missouri and New York universities, he soon realized that without access to a nearby botanic garden, his teaching and research programs would be handicapped. Accordingly, among his first acts in 1954 was to propose that the Division of Life Sciences establish a botanic garden, preferably nearby. His proposal was supported wholeheartedly by Professor Herman Speith, a zoologist and then chairman of the Division, but for budgetary purposes it was called the Life Sciences Experimental Area.
Another botanist, Dr. Frank C. Vasek, joined the Division staff with a fresh Ph.D. from UCLA in systematic botany. He was appointed to foster Dr. Goodman's botanic garden proposal soon after his arrival at Riverside in August 1954. Professor Vasek then prepared a formal budget proposal, justified largely on teaching and research needs in botany. Probably because of the size of this small liberal arts college, as it was then conceived, the administration at Berkeley seemed to doubt that the small student enrollment at that time could justify a botanic garden. Hence, the Life Science Experimental Area remained an unfunded paper project for several years. However, local support was steadfast.
Although the project had, as yet, no land allocation or budget, Professor Vasek immediately (1954) started collecting plants for a botanic garden. For this purpose, some benches in Life Sciences greenhouses 16 and 17 were used, together with a small nursery plot between them.
In 1960, the Regents expanded the scope of the Riverside campus, declaring it a general campus of the University. This effectively abandoned the original small liberal arts college concept, and opened the way for adding a College of Agriculture and other teaching units. Undoubtedly, this helped to raise the priority accorded to the botanic garden project by the administration at Berkeley. In any case, funds were provided in the 1962-63 budget to begin the development of the Life Sciences Experimental Area site.
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