Garden of the Month – February 2026: St. George Village Botanical Garden
This month’s Garden of the Month comes from the Caribbean. St. George Village Botanical Garden sits on land shaped by many different chapters of history, from early settlement through agriculture to its role today as a botanical garden.
The piece below looks at the practical work behind rebuilding plant records at SGVBG, and how that work is helping the garden better understand its living collection and plan for the future.
Unexpectedly blooming on the island of St. Croix lies one of the true hidden gems of the United States Virgin Islands. Set across 16 acres, the St. George Village Botanical Garden (SGVBG) is a place shaped by various layers of Caribbean history.
The property overlaps what was once an Amerindian settlement dating back to the first century, and contains the remains of an 18th-century Danish sugar cane plantation.
Estate St. George was one of the plantations burned during the historic Fire Burn of 1878. By the year 1916, the sugar factory at St. George had closed, and the cane fields were repurposed as pastoral land. In the early 1970s, much of the land was unused and dense tropical vegetation began to reclaim the majority of the land and its structures. The property was later donated by the owners to the St. Croix Garden Club to establish the St. George Village Botanical Garden in the year 1972.
At present, the garden’s mission reflects a commitment to preserving St. Croix’s ethnobotanical heritage. Through an extensive herbarium collection with over 6,000 dried and pressed specimens, a diverse living plant collection, a well-stocked seed bank, preserved historical structures, a functioning nursery, and a museum containing artifacts from 100AD, SGVBG is achieving that mission. Together, these elements tell the story of plants, people, and place across generations.
As of June 2024, much of the record-keeping for plant collections at the garden were largely absent. There was a singular notebook with handwritten data, and an outdated spreadsheet with that same data logged digitally. Much of this information was difficult to confirm whether or not it was accurate or still in existence. Accurate record-keeping is essential to our work, ensuring that the cultural, historical, and ecological knowledge tied to each plant is preserved and not lost with time or staff changes.
After purchasing Hortis in the fall of 2024, confirmed existing records were digitized and uploaded to our database with support from the Hortis team and their data transfer tools. Later that same fall and with the assistance of a notable botanist from the Royal Botanic Gardens Kew, we were able to begin to breathe life back into our records by first identifying nearly all of the woody tree and shrub species on the garden grounds, allowing for new accessions. This was a huge leap for the garden – moving from very limited reliable data to having a significant number of specimens tagged and cataloged in Hortis.
This work directly supported the garden’s successful achievement of Level II Arboretum Accreditation in 2025, marking an important milestone in the formal recognition of our living collection.
We currently sit with nearly 1,000 accessions in our database consisting of close to 600 taxa. We do know this number has yet to include many of our smaller, herbaceous and ornamental specimens planted on the property. The garden knowingly consists of over 1,000 Caribbean and pantropical plant species that we are still actively working to log and tag. Rebuilding our plant records has strengthened our ability to share knowledge with visitors, researchers, and future caretakers of the garden.
SGVBG is optimistic about the current trajectory of the garden and strives to lean into the momentum we have created so that we may continue to be a space of beauty, preservation, and education for generations to come.
Connect with St. George Village Botanical Garden
https://www.thegardenstcroix.org/