Our Collections

Marsh Botanical Garden provides a welcome connection with the natural world. Whether you are a plant enthusiast, teacher, researcher, conservationist, public educator,  new or seasoned gardener, you will find plants of interest in our indoors and outdoor collections from all over the world, including many desert, carnivorous, rare, and endangered  plant species. 
Find Specimens
Use this ArcGIS web-app to identify specific plants in the outdoor garden areas or indoord greenhouses.
 
The Desert House
Highlights plants that have evolved to live in some of the most forbidding climates on our planet. Unique water-storing capacities and heat- and sun-tolerance tactics are part of the wonder of these xerophytic plants.
Tropical Collections
This collection features various plants that are of cultural and industrial interest in regions of the tropics. Our accession choices reflect our instructors' interest in ethnobotanical topics. The collection includes representatives from all major groups of plants to reflect the incredible diversity of the tropical flora.
Carnivorous Collections
This collection focuses on plants that have evolved to garner their nutrition from their modified leaves. Representing many geographic regions including Connecticut and the East Coast of temperate North America to Borneo and Sumatra, the display highlights a variety of tactics that plants use to obtain the nutrients in flies and other insects.
Outdoor Collection
Some of the systematic collection plantings that Beatrix Farrand had designed into the Garden still exist, with Ericaceous plants taking the lead. Rhododendron, azalea, pieris, mountain laurel and blueberry provide spring, summer and fall displays. A native plant bog garden is nestled next to one of the springs that pop out of our hillside. Wildflower displays in the summer months, from May into October, provide an interesting alternative to the lawn in several areas.  Garden beds near the greenhouses provide color as well with perennial and annual plantings, including a large planting of tender bulbs (gladiolus and calla lilies) that stayin the ground protected by the foundation of a greenhouse. We also have a large number of Asian plants, incluiding several types of Japanese Maples in the Honorary Ian Sussex Moss and Bryophyte Garden. In that same area are growing several Camellias and Leycesteria, protected from the winter weather by a south facing nook near the Koi Pond and contemplation seat.