Plants back: Re‐envisioning botanical garden collections management for indigenous crops

Societal Impact Statement Botanical gardens and other ex situ collections play a key role in preventing plant extinctions, yet the needs of Indigenous crop cultivars are not being met by conventional botanical collections management practices. Inspired by Indigenous land care restoration movements centering plant–human–society relationships, we propose a path toward reciprocal engagement with cultural and practical plant knowledge‐keepers. By adapting practices around documenting, tracking, and maintaining plants, and promoting pluralism in the care of Indigenous crops, botanical gardens can more effectively apply Indigenous concepts of care‐taking for culturally significant plants within their collections and build new synergies to benefit local food systems and cultural revitalization. Summary Botanical gardens are an essential component to global plant biodiversity conservation and education but have historically overlooked Indigenous crop cultivars and their accompanying knowledge systems and communities. Drawing on our experiences in Indigenous crop conservation in Hawai'i, we argue that regional gardens and other ex situ collections curating cultural plants must acknowledge colonial disruption of traditional plant access and knowledge to move beyond conventional conservation paradigms. We propose a botanical collections management framework that emphasizes equitable partnerships, centers people and plants together to strengthen collections documentation, verification, and long‐term stewardship, and advances in situ restoration of culturally important crops. This multipronged framework adapts current curation and collections management practices to address: (1) historical ethnobotanical/biocultural relationships, (2) plant traits, health status, and care, (3) cultivar verification, (4) longitudinal plant health and management tracking, and (5) restoration to local food systems. By reframing collections management practices to foster connections between people and plants throughout the entire process and collaborating on biocultural community‐building and multigenerational celebrations of plant diversity, botanical gardens can enhance efforts to return culturally significant crop plants back to communities. This shift repositions regional botanical gardens as spaces for healing, reconnection, and Indigenous foodways revitalization.