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Oct 13 2026
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Meet Our New Executive Director

By Bellevue Botanical Garden, E-News Articles, Organizational Updates No Comments
Bellevue Botanical Garden Society Welcomes Dave Martine as New Executive Director The Bellevue Botanical Garden Society is pleased to welcome Dave Martine as our new Executive Director. Dave began his new role on October 12, bringing extensive nonprofit and executive leadership experience to BBGS. In his role, Dave will work to strengthen the connections between the Garden, the Society, and the community, expand partnerships, and support the long-term future of one of the Eastside’s most treasured public spaces. Prior to…
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May 27 2026
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Continuing to Evolve How We Welcome and Engage Our Visitors

By Bellevue Botanical Garden, Organizational Updates No Comments
The Bellevue Botanical Garden Society (BBGS), a 501(c)(3) nonprofit organization, is the primary partner of the Garden and supports educational programming, horticultural learning, and visitor services. Through programs, events, volunteers, and community partnerships, BBGS helps connect visitors with the unique plants, ecosystems, and gardening practices of the Pacific Northwest. Nearly 500,000 people visit the Bellevue Botanical Garden each year. They include people who live, work, and play in Bellevue, as well as families, school groups, and visitors from across the…
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Mar 30 2026
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Five Tips for Successful Container Gardening

By Gardening No Comments
Five Tips for Successful Container Gardening By Angelina Demiroska Gardening is rewarding, but not everyone has the yard space needed for traditional garden beds. Container gardening offers a flexible and accessible alternative, allowing plants to thrive on patios, balconies, and small urban spaces. Because containers create a unique growing environment, however, they require slightly different care than plants grown in the ground. The following five tips can help your container plants stay healthy and productive. 1. Pay attention to air,…
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Nov 10 2025
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Dahlias Demystified: From Origins to Overwintering

By Bellevue Botanical Garden, Botany, Gardening No Comments
By Angelina (Alexia) Demiroska, BBG volunteer writer If you have been in a dahlia garden before, you might’ve found yourself wondering if you were a victim of false advertising. Are these flowers that look so different from each other really all dahlias? The answer is yes. The Dahlia is native to many regions of Mexico. The Nahuatl name given to it was Acocoxochitl (roughly translating to water cane). Some suggest that dahlias were useful in Aztec agriculture, but supporting evidence…
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Jun 14 2023
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The Mighty Gunnera

By Bellevue Botanical Garden, Botany, Gardening, History, Nature One Comment
The Mighty Gunnera By Cecilia Ayres   The Bellevue Botanical Garden is home to several Gunnera tinctoria plants. With their giant, serrated green leaves, thick, spiky stalks, and vibrant red flower spikes, they are easy to spot. The leaves can grow to be four feet across and stand at eight feet tall in the right conditions. These unique features are not only stunning, but characteristics that date back to the Cretaceous Period—yes, gunneras were around in the time of dinosaurs!…
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Dec 06 2022
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Meet the Garden d’Lights Build & Install Team!

By Garden d'Lights No Comments
The Garden d'Lights Build & Install Team By Lucy Braginski Carl is one of two repair people on the Garden d’Lights volunteer team. He's been volunteering for 27 years- since the beginning of Garden d’Lights. His co-repair volunteer is Monica Privat. As repair volunteers, Carl and Monica work with broken lights, flowers, and anything part of the event flora that isn't working. Carl says they can spend hours on a broken piece, and having “two mindsets… pretty efficient.” Carl got involved…
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Oct 22 2022
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The Oldest Tree in My Neighborhood

By Bellevue Botanical Garden, History, Nature One Comment
By guest writer McKenzie Toomey I sat down in the shade of the towering White Oak, and I watched the branches sway above me. The leaves rustled against each other in the wind, almost whispering to me. I rested my hands on the outcropping roots that grew nearly six feet out from the tree’s base, and I felt the energy that flowed through the tree, the energy that had created this mammoth of nature, the energy that sustained this ancient…
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Jul 16 2021
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Plant Awareness Disparity & Our Snap-It Challenge!

By Bellevue Botanical Garden, Botany, Nature, Youth Education No Comments
By Kate Sorensen What is “Plant Awareness Disparity”? Plant Awareness Disparity (PAD) is a term proposed by Kathryn Parsley to replace an older term: “plant blindness.” To summarize her proposal, there is a disparity between how Euro-centric people notice plants in their environment versus how they notice animals. This disparity is based on attention, attitude, knowledge, and relative interest towards plants. She wrote: “The disparity between how often people notice plants compared to how often people notice animals is what…
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Apr 28 2021
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2021 Online Educational Activities for Kids and Families

By Resources, Youth Education No Comments
City Nature Challenge City Nature Challenge is an international four-day bioblitz that encourages folks to get outside, take as many pictures of plants and animals they find in the wild, and upload them to their iNaturalist app. This event is ordinarily a friendly challenge between cities, but this year the organizers want to embrace the healing power of nature and encourage the collaborative aspect of the City Nature Challenge. The Challenge takes place in 2 parts: For 2021, April 30-May…
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Dec 23 2020
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Intro to Botanical Names Part Two: Pronunciation

By Adult Education, Botany, Nature, Resources No Comments
Intro to Botanical Names Part Two: Pronunciation By Cynthia Welte  In the first blog article on botanical names, we looked at how plant names are constructed. Now … time to get brave and say them out loud!  A note on my phonetic spellings: the Æ or æ symbol is an “a” as it is pronounced in cat or Seattle. Accented syllables are in all caps. This isn’t in any way official but is how it makes sense to me. Plant…
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The Bellevue Botanical Garden is a successful partnership between City of Bellevue Parks and Community Services and the Bellevue Botanical Garden Society, a 501(c)(3) nonprofit organization.

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