ABSTRACT
Ancillary botanic gardens (ABG) is a category of botanic gardens that seeks to support a grassroots approach to informal botanical education. ABGs are established in any open site that has existing levels of land protection owing to its primary purpose, such as educational institutions, private institutions, touristic places, religious landholdings, and archaeological sites. The main drive is a local interest to connect people with plants. Accordingly, ABGs seek to engage the more significant part of taxonomically illiterate members of society in conceiving and operating botanic gardens by relying on local nomenclature, common names, or more formally through collaboration with educational institutions. By engaging people from various sectors and backgrounds in ABGs, nature, local and global, is promoted and valued from different perspectives. This chapter highlights the transformation of the American University of Beirut’s campus into an ancillary botanic garden. It sheds light on the decision-making process adopted at the university institution to achieve the status of botanic garden. It demonstrates how, by becoming an ancillary botanic garden, the management strategy changed toward a more biophilic campus. It also describes new informal botanical learning opportunities that were introduced to campus.
