Denver Botanic Garden Inc

Visitor experience: in 2024, 1,466,317 individuals visited the denver botanic gardens six exhibitions opened in the freyer newman center galleries, presenting a mix of international and colorado-based artists. Exhibits included river's voice: textiles by alexandra kehayoglou, featuring monumental textiles and shadow and light: patrick marold, an immersive sculptural installation. The outdoor exhibition spirit guides: fantastical creatures from the workshop of jacobo and mara ngeles highlighted mexican traditions and plants of oaxaca. Four traveling exhibitions toured to other venues nationwide, including la calavera catrina at cheyenne botanic gardens in wyoming and golden opportunity at fernbank museum of natural history in georgia. Five artists in residence (maeve eichelberger, jaime molina, raymundo munoz, catherine owens and devin urioste) worked with gardens staff to create artwork exploring humanity's relationship with the natural world.blossoms of light, the gardens' largest event, welcomed 191,611 visitors. The gardens also hosted evenings al fresco and glow at the gardens in addition to an online spring plant sale & fall plant & bulb sale.

Education and outreach: in 2024, denver botanic gardens' education programs reached 30,028 school children, providing hands-on experiences, standards-based science lessons and the opportunity for children to explore the marvels of the plant world, both in person and virtually. About 25% of these children came from low-income schools and benefited from the gardens' educational access program. More than 14,000 people participated in family and children's programs while the mordecai children's garden continued to flourish. Adult classes and workshops served 32,000 registrants in a wide variety of content areas. The helen fowler library offered public, in-person access six days a week and electronic access throughout the year.outreach programs are a cornerstone in the gardens' mission and include horticulture therapy services for the elderly, people with disabilities and veterans. Our urban food intitiatives programs provided fresh produce to local food desert communities, distributing 10,500 pounds of fresh produce to various community groups.

Operations and maintenance

Horticulture, science and conservation: denver botanic gardens is responsible for living plant collections and horticultural garden displays, which include more than 51,000 living plants, belonging to 10,000+ species. Our wide range of gardens illustrate the connection between plants and people. Our diverse collections feature plants from all corners of the world, from the tropics to the tundra. Distinctive gardens define and celebrate our regional sense of place in our unique high altitude, semi-arid climate and geography. As an accredited museum, our diverse collections are used for education, research and pure enjoyment. Among our living collections reside two national collections registered with the national plant collections network (pcn): oaks (quercus) and alpines of the world. Scientific research is closely linked to everything at the gardens. The core motivation of our scientific work is to investigate and explain biodiversity patterns and processes. We actively conduct scientific research, serve as a resource of scientific expertise and work to train the next generation of scientists. Our programs include population monitoring, seed collection, genetic investigations for conservation or taxonomic clarification, habitat restoration, urban tree assessments and community science. The gardens documents plant and fungal diversity with a focus on the southern rocky mountain region through our collecting efforts. The kathryn kalmbach vascular plant herbarium houses nearly 80,000 specimens while the sam mitchel herbarium of fungi houses just over 20,000 well-curated specimens from the region. We accessioned our 100,000th speciment in 2024. The gardens trains the next generation of scientists through graduate student programs in collaboration with the university of colorado at denver and other local organizations. Our expanded restoration studies examining seed mixes and influence of a warming climate on plant success through common garden studies continued with two active field sites. In addition, we collected genetic data on plants from multiple source locations growing in our common garden in order to better understand the influence of genetics and environment on success of restoration projects. In partnership with the us bureau of land management we made seed collections in support of the national native seed strategy and the seeds of success program across wyoming in 2024.the gardens' center for global initiatives is an example of the gardens' work around the globe. We continued our collaboration with instituto nacional de tecnologa agropecuaria (inta), argentina in 2024. This collaboration was developed to exchange information and capacity on propagation and research of native flora of both argentina, patagonia in particular, and the rocky mountain and plains regions of colorado. In 2024 the center for global initiatives also stewards the exchange of knowledge, resources, and collaboration of national academy of sciences, institutes of botany through central asia, vietnam and the caucasuses. The center for global initiatives also partnered with ecole nationale suprieure d'agriculture of senegal in the master planning and development of a new botanic garden in thies senegal.

Chatfield farms: the mission of denver botanic gardens chatfield farms is to inspire the public to be good stewards of the environment by connecting people to our past, present and future relationships with plants of the rocky mountain region. Chatfield farms is a 700-acre native plant refuge and working farm located along the banks of deer creek in southern jefferson county. Starting in february, chatfield farms were under construction for phase 1 of the master development plan and for the 4.5-acre solar farm. Eighteen million dollars in improvements to be completed in 2025 were initiated. Attendance at events and daily visitor numbers totaled 203,177. The lavender festival hosted 11,255 attendees in the two-day event. Corn maze was another great success with 61,716 visitors during september and october. The pumpkin festival hosted 36,646 attendees and nearly 27,000 pumpkins were purchased by visitors. Trail of lights attendance was 44,000. The second annual hops festival attracted around 1,000 attendees to sample local brews. Beer made from our own hops grown at chatfield farms. The community supporting agriculture (csa) program grew over 72,000 pounds of more than 30 different varieties of vegetables and flowers distributed to 300 paying shareholders in 2024. The program donated 18% of this produce to numerous not-for profits and foodbanks including same caf, gracefull caf, and metro caring. The csa also provided agriculture business development training for urban farmers.