Botanic and heritage gardens as living laboratories in the age of the polycrisis

Societal Impact Statement Cities face intertwined crises of climate, biodiversity loss and social disconnection. We show how botanic and heritage gardens can help address these challenges as living laboratories to generate place‐based evidence and public engagement. Preliminary pilots using low‐cost, scalable ecological monitoring tools reveal measurable ecological co‐benefits and improved public understanding when monitoring of Biodiversity and Nature‐based Solutions is paired with sensory design and participatory interpretation. Our findings offer practical pathways for municipal adoption: costed maintenance, governance, standardised metrics and training, and are relevant to planners, conservation managers, educators and community groups seeking scalable, evidence‐led nature‐based solutions that reconnect people with plants and urban resilience today. Summary Cities are increasingly confronted by a polycrisis of climate instability, biodiversity loss, food insecurity and social fragmentation. Within this context, botanic and heritage gardens are uniquely positioned as curated, managed and publicly accessible landscapes, to function as living laboratories capable of prototyping, evaluating and translating Nature‐based Solutions (NbS) for wider urban application. This opinion piece draws upon practitioner experience and early work initiated at the University of Dundee Botanic Garden and further developed at the House of Dun (National Trust for Scotland), weaving together key conceptual frames, including the polycrisis, shifting baseline syndrome and declining plant awareness. Presenting an evolving role for botanic gardens, extending beyond their traditional curatorial remit towards a translational role: generating contextualised evidence and interpretive narratives that can be meaningfully adapted by municipal partners, communities and funders. Realising this potential will require careful attention to the enabling conditions for transferability, including sustained maintenance funding, robust governance arrangements and ongoing capacity building.