It can also identify things like books, paintings in museums, plants, and animals.
Here, the museum raises plants that would have been familiar to slaves from both Africa and the New World.
Beth recognized that it should be an educational institution, a museum of plants, and she was very forceful.
The Queens Botanical Garden is what its director, Susan Lacerte, calls a living museum of plants, trees and flowers.
While new monuments like the National Gallery's East Building and the Vietnam Memorial drew record crowds, the nation's living museum of plants sat forgotten and neglected.
But the museum's plant division closed, and all the nurseries in our area think I'm cuckoo.
Together, the two of them have also been trying to ensure that the museum's plant and animal collections - historically reserved for specialists - are more widely available, and in a form that's useful for conservation.
Our results are at odds with the notion that the tropics represent a museum of plant biodiversity (places of historically lowered extinction) and we discuss mechanisms that may reconcile this apparent contradiction.
'Número Uno.' " This weekend, the 450-acre living museum for desert plants will open a new, two-acre native plant garden, with lupines and brittlebush and all the plants that are disappearing around here.
"I looked around and it was like a museum, all those plants like a historic exhibit, but it's actually still very current," she said.
