Our Mission
We were born from a vacant lot in Chinatown transformed by a community of plant obsessed people, and inspired by the first public botanic garden in America. Built on this island in 1801, closed in 1814, and never replaced. MBG will revive Manhattan's forgotten botanic legacy as a living museum worthy of the cultural capital of the world. By pairing exceptional specimens with elegant design, we show the public that plant cultivation is both an attainable skill and an art form.
Elgin Botanical Garden
The Elgin Botanic Garden was the first public botanic garden in the United States, founded in 1801 in what is now midtown Manhattan. Physician and botanist David Hosack developed about twenty acres with a large collection of native and exotic plants for scientific and medical study. Financial strain forced him to sell the property to the State of New York in 1810. The land was later transferred to Columbia College in 1814, and the garden was eventually abandoned. By the 1920s the site had become part of the area redeveloped as Rockefeller Center.
Our long-term aspiration is to symbolically return a botanic garden to Manhattan. Not as a sprawling landscape, but as a contemporary, small-footprint urban model that reflects how New Yorkers can live with plants today. In this way, we honor Manhattan’s botanical legacy while reinterpreting it for modern city life.
Cactus Store NYC
Cactus Store began in Echo Park, Los Angeles in 2014, founded by Carlos Morera, Max Martin and their collaborators. A group that described themselves less as plant sellers and more as relationship brokers between people and the botanical world. Every plant in the store was one of a kind, selected for its unique form or rarity; what collectors call "specimen quality". Plants people cherish for years and pass down through generations.
In 2017, the team loaded hundreds of rare desert specimens into a climate-controlled truck and drove across the country to open a seasonal New York outpost on the Lower East Side. Cactus Store NYC occupied the only empty lot on Essex Street. Transforming it into an unlikely garden sanctuary with building-height Vivax timber bamboo trucked in from Oregon, planted amongst massive basalt boulders, with an understory of native ferns and sixteen species of moss. Each year the team set out on sourcing road trips across the American desert, bringing back plants that New York had never seen.
From 2017 to 2023, the space grew into something far beyond a plant shop. It became a gathering place for musicians, botanists, thinkers, and curious minds. Hosting meditative performances, film screenings, rare plant shows, and convivial dinners that inhabited the porous boundary between nature and culture. When the vacant lot sold for development in 2023, it marked the end of one of Manhattan's most quietly beloved green spaces.
Lower East Side Cactus & Succulent Society
The Lower East Side Cactus and Succulent Society (LESCSS) was formed in 2019 in the storage room of Cactus Store NYC. A natural outgrowth of the community that had already been quietly forming around the Essex Street lot for years. Regulars, collectors, and first-time plant owners kept coming back, and LESCSS gave that community a name, a shared purpose, and a home in person and online. LESCSS is a community where one can further their knowledge on growing plants via lectures, workshops, screenings, and classes. What began as a storage room conversation has grown into a large community of dedicated horticulturalists. Proof that the right space, and a shared purpose, can turn strangers into a society.
NonHuman Teachers
Founded by Carlos Morera, Max Martin, and Christian Cummings in 2022, Nonhuman Teachers is a 501(c)(3) nonprofit organization that takes a new approach to ecological storytelling, blending science, art, and the imagination to help deepen the relationship between humans and the natural world.
Through our multidisciplinary public programming, immersive botanical spaces, and new nature media, we aim to ignite a sense of wonder about our rapidly changing Earth, not only to make us better citizens of this place but to help us imagine it differently.
HORT/CULTURE was a monthly salon-style event series curated by Cactus Store and Nonhuman Teachers, presented by 9 Orchard. Guests have included filmmaker John Wilson of HBO's How To with John Wilson and musician Molly Lewis joined for an evening of what the series called "human weirdness." Joey Santore known online as Crime Pays but Botany Doesn't brought his charismatic storytelling and tales from expeditions across the American scrublands. Other evenings featured musician and philosopher David Rothenberg, Grammy Award winner and author of Why Birds Sing, alongside technologist Jaron Lanier, for a night of interspecies improvisation and ecological sound.
HORT/CULTURE was a room where a rare plant, a live performance, and a radical idea about the natural world can all share the same breath.
MBG: A Natural Evolution
Manhattan Botanic Garden is not a new idea so much as an inevitable one. It is the natural culmination of everything built across Cactus Store NYC, LESCSS, and Nonhuman Teachers; three projects that spent nearly a decade proving that New York City has an unmet hunger for intimate, serious engagement with the plant world. When the Essex Street lot sold in 2023 and Cactus Store NYC closed its doors, it left behind more than an empty plot. It left a void in the cultural life of the Lower East Side that a seasonal retail garden was never meant to permanently fill and that a botanic garden now can.
Today, every borough in New York City has a botanic garden except Manhattan, the borough that gave America its first. We believe we are the right people to change that. Not because the idea is overdue, though it is, but because we have already done the harder work: building a genuine community around plants, developing deep expertise in indoor horticulture suited to urban conditions, and bringing an artist's eye to the way living things are displayed and experienced. MBG is an institution that has already been quietly forming for years, finally ready to find its permanent home.
What MBG Will Be
MBG will distinguish itself from other botanic gardens, as we don’t plan to be a sprawling landscape, and aren’t counting on having a large greenhouse. Instead we plan to be mostly indoors, a small footprint, new model of botanic garden, that could only be done in the 21st century. We’ll focus on container growing, and the plants in our exhibitions will be grown mostly under grow lights. Growing conditions New Yorkers actually can relate to. The botanic garden will feel more like a living museum, and will have the warmth and elegant design of a historic hotel.
We will foreground the history of horticulture, the art of pottery, ethnobotany, and the principles of curation and display. It will be a place where horticulture and culture share the same soil; intimate in scale, serious in purpose, and open to everyone who has ever felt that a city without plants is missing something essential. We hope our creative instinct and enthusiasm for nature can foster a more meaningful connection to the natural world. Not a monument to nature, nature itself; growing, breathing, and permanently at home in Manhattan.
