A new century. Hailed by multitudes as a new millennium. Frankly, the plants could care less: millennia are human constructs. Angiosperms have existed for at least 127,000 millennia, and vascular plants, with their water-conducting and sugar-translocating tissues, evolved on land more the 415,000 millennia ago. Plants withstood the cataclysmic collision of an asteroid with Mother Earth 65,000 millennia ago, an event that some claim terminated the existence of non-flying dinosaurs. For plants, one more millennium is just the blink of an eye.
Rather than the passing of millennia, plants track diurnal and seasonal climatic characters--temperature, intensity of sunlight, day length, rainfall, and relative humidity. Here in Westwood, for example, our plants would be shocked by any nighttime temperature approaching freezing, given that we haven't received a freeze of any type for at least fifty years. And herein lies our success as a botanical garden. MEMBG is one of only a handful of gardens in the United States where tropical plants have a chance to be grown outdoors without special shelters and warming devices.
Our aspiration for the beginning of this century is to make the best use of our location, in the mildest climatic zone within the continental United States, to showcase tropical plants in an outdoor setting. Our challenge is to create a tropical experience for our visitors outdoors, supplementing the garden's other natural settings. We also strive to provide a major educational attraction for schools within an hour's drive of Westwood, an incentive to draw visitors and other visitors back to Westwood Village, and a source of pride for the university. This is, of course, a tall order, and won't have a full millennium in which to accomplish our objectives. Thus, we invite you to support us, to permit this dream of ours to become reality.