THE EXPANSION

REFINING THE PLAN

Wisdom, knowledge and compromise will develop design for world class botanical garden, says Garden Director Harry Jongerden

“GET WITH the program!” Do people still use this phrase from the 1980s? It seems a little passé these days, but we’ll be bringing it back in vogue here at the TBG over the next months, both in its 1980s pop cultural sense, and in a very technical architectural sense.

As an architecture or design concept, determining “the program” is the first conversation that we will have with the multi-disciplinary team of design consultants working on the expanded botanical garden. The program is simply a technical term given to a client’s wish list. In the TBG’s case, we need to determine the program for the expanded 35-acre site that we will be developing. We can tell the consultants that we want them to design a worldclass botanical garden, but their first question will be, so what are you looking for?

Botanical gardens are highly complex cultural institutions. TBG has a mission that requires us to connect people to plants and nature, and a vision where we aspire to be renowned for our display of nature’s beauty, as well as becoming a dynamic hub for plant-centred learning, conservation and research. We can’t just tell our design consultants to make it so.

Realistically speaking, there’s also the tricky business of generating enough revenue from the site to make the TBG financially viable. The program for the expansion project will need to balance our mission and vision responsibilities with our need to generate revenue. The design consultants will need to hear from us just how much space is devoted to mission and vision activities, and how much is devoted to the ancillary revenue-generating activities that will support our mission and vision. To sum up some of the program development challenges, we don’t exist as a botanical garden to provide rental opportunities, but we won’t exist without them.

Here’s an incomplete wish list for the detailed design consultants. We’re looking for: • A variety of beautiful garden spaces of botanical interest, with

educational potential and plant conservation rigour • Education space for both indoor and outdoor activities; children’s education space • Event space for both TBG-branded and private events, with catering infrastructure and more • Rental space (see above); retail space; food services space; meeting space; office space; maintenance space and volunteer space • Library services space • ‘Wayfinding’ signage; focused visitor entry; navigable and accessible pathways; secure fencing and good washrooms!

Our wish list is long, but not quite endless. The design consultants will need to hear from us just how much space is devoted to each of the needs/ demands of a world-class botanical garden. Developing the wish list or program, of course, requires the TBG to be knowledgeable in the workings of successful large botanical gardens. We have years of experience, with years of study under our collective belt, to determine that. With wisdom and compromise applied to this knowledge, we will come up with our program. And at that point, in a spirit of compromise, we’ll all need to “get with the program”!

Stay tuned. The successful detailed design consultant team will be announced very soon!