LuEsther T. Mertz Library

The story

The first library in the United States devoted exclusively to botany, the LuEsther T. Mertz Library opened in 1899 inside a Renaissance Revival building Robert W. Gibson had designed three years earlier. Its four-story gray-buff brick facade faces the Fountain of Life and the Tulip Tree Allee, a quietly grand approach inside the New York Botanical Garden. Renamed in the 1990s for LuEsther Mertz, it is now the country's largest botanical research library, its rare and current holdings reaching across ethnobotany, architectural history, and environmental policy — proof that a plant collection is never only about plants.