University of Delaware Office of Public Relations The Messenger Vol. 5, No. 4/1996 Stressing the importance of urban green space For Judith Zuk, Delaware '77M, the chief executive officer of Brooklyn Botanic Garden, urban green space is a natural and necessary coexistence. The concept of a garden serving multiple missions of public service, science and education occurred to her several years ago during a visit to the New York Botanical Garden. But, the seeds, so to speak, were planted much earlier. Looking back, Zuk says she realizes she was affected early on by some influential, amateur gardeners. "I remember as a kid growing up in New Jersey that I always loved being out in the garden.... My grandmothers were both great gardeners and our landlady was a frustrated gardener, whose husband had paved over most of the gardening space. She spent the subsequent years reclaiming the asphalt," she says. After earning her master's degree in public horticulture administration from UD, Zuk realized she needed more practical experience with plants. So, she spent a year in England getting hands-on experience at the Royal Horticultural Society gardens. "There is no better way to learn plants than to get right in there amongst them, digging around," she says. Eventually, Zuk wound her way to Brooklyn, after stints of work and study at Swarthmore College and Cornell University. "For me, coming to Brooklyn was something like coming full circle. When I was studying botany in Newark, N.J., one of my teachers had this great vision of creating a botanic garden there. I guess I caught a bit of his vision...that gardening and horticulture could have a very positive effect on the citizens of an urban environment. So, when I was invited to interview for the Brooklyn position, one of the things that had led me to this profession in the beginning was suddenly in the forefront." Zuk has held her current title of president of the garden since 1990. As the chief executive officer, she reports directly to the board of trustees and supervises a staff of about 130. "My responsibilities are increasingly removed from the day-to-day, hands-on running of the garden and directed toward fund-raising. We have a $9 million budget that needs to be raised annually. While some $600,000 of that comes from endowment income, the balance must come from public, private and earned income." Zuk celebrates her location, even as the city pulses just beyond her gates. "I think we are the finest urban, botanic garden in the country. There are many gardens that are equally good, some more beautiful, but we are the one that is most centrally, smack-dab in the middle of the city," she says. "What we provide for the people around us is an extraordinary combination of things. Brooklyn is the largest of the five boroughs in New York City. We have two and a half million people in Brooklyn alone, which means that one of every hundred people in the U.S. is a neighbor of ours. Of the 80 square miles in Brooklyn, 52 acres comprise the garden. "There are just thousands of people hungry for some green space; they crave beauty, just as they crave the natural environment. They really treasure the garden. There are 93 ethnic groups in the borough, and people don't always live peacefully among each other out there in the street. But, when they come into the garden, it is as if the surroundings transform them. It is a very civilizing, very inspiring environment." The garden is committed to educating children. "I know what you can do if you take a small child and you feed positive ideas into his head. He will carry them with him his whole life," Zuk says. The garden considers itself part of the educational infrastructure of the surrounding communities in which it exists. "At times, what we provide is not just a supplement to what the regular school system is doing, but a replacement, because so many schools are now operating with less resources," she says. Since the early 1900s, city kids have been invited to grow and tend plants in the garden. Children may attend sessions in the spring, summer and fall; many of them stay on to become junior instructors. "It is a very successful way to teach kids gardening, responsibility and mathematics," Zuk says. "They have to measure and add, and they have to learn to cooperate because they garden in pairs." A handful of promising young gardeners also enter the junior botanist program. "They are 10 to 12 years old, capricious, smart as tacks, and we have high hopes that a few of them will become scientists," she says. Beyond the educational programs already in place, Zuk has other goals. She would like to completely renew the garden features-structures and plantings-which are now 85 years old. The garden staff also is working to expand community outreach programs, working with schools, block associations and community groups, creating satellites of the Brooklyn Botanic Garden-because "even though we get close to a million visitors a year, we still know we're not reaching everybody," Zuk explains. Brooklyn Botanic Garden is something of a dinosaur in that it is one of the last museums or gardens in the city with free admission. Due to the "roller coaster of city funding," that will change this year, Zuk says. "We've been the last hold out, representing a time when public funding provided these kind of amenities to all citizens free of charge. "I think that, for urban green spaces and urban gardens, the future is very encouraging because the need becomes greater all the time. The role that we all play is one of preserving open space, preserving biodiversity, being part of the educational infrastructure of our communities and encouraging the plants and people combination," she says. -Donna Kinney Speers