Lúcia Lohmann sees MoBOT as a ‘window from St. Louis to the world’

When Lúcia G. Lohmann moved to St. Louis to become the president and director of the Missouri Botanical Garden in January 2025, she had some sense of what she was getting into. While Lohmann is a native of Brazil and at that point was a professor at the University of California, Berkeley, she’d first come to the botanical garden as a 17-year-old undergraduate studying plants. She later earned both her master’s and doctoral degrees at the University of Missouri St. Louis—a university she chose because of its proximity to MoBOT. 

“I  really feel this is the place where I grew up as a scientist, and the thought of coming back to St. Louis in this capacity and contributing to the long future of the institution and botany as a whole was an opportunity I couldn’t pass up,” she says, adding, “ I always considered St. Louis as my second home after Sao Paulo.”

That doesn’t mean Lohmann has approached MoBOT as a specimen to be preserved. In her first year on the job, she’s been putting her stamp on the place and its 500 employees, including a reorganization that saw the departure of three senior leaders. (She says she wanted a “flatter” org chart, with direct lines between herself and twice as many people.) Under her direction, MoBOT is embarking on a period of strategic planning to shape its future.

“The  first thing was to listen and learn, understand some initial priorities, get things organized,” she recalls in a new episode of The 314 Podcast. “After we get the right team, right structure in place, the second year is strategic planning. We just launched our kickoff meeting last week about the strategic planning, and the goal is really to think, OK, what will be our key priorities moving forward?”

That’s not just a question for MoBOT staff, but for the community. Lohmann wants the garden to engage with even the casual visitors who stop by the garden. “We really want it to be a participatory approach, with lots of input from the community so we can really build this next chapter together,” she says.

That next chapter may bring some changes to beloved seasonal events such as the Whitaker Music Festival in the summer and Garden Glow in the winter. As Lohmann acknowledges, the Missouri Botanical Garden has two very different focuses: On one hand, it’s a global leader in botany, something Lohmann says is only true of two other gardens in the entire world (that’s the New York Botanical Garden and Kew Gardens in London). On the other, it’s also a popular community spot for events like birthday parties, live music, and, yes, hot cocoa while listening to Christmas pop tunes. It is Lohmann’s goal to connect those two focuses a little more intentionally—to, in her words, “bring those two worlds closer together.” 

But she’s convinced cocoa and botany can exist side by side, pointing out, “If you’re drinking your hot cocoa, well, that’s a species native to Brazil where you wouldn’t be having your cocoa if there wasn’t Theobroma cacao.” To Lohmann, everything connects to plants. 

The Missouri Botanical Garden is currently in the midst of a major project to digitize its vast collection, which boasts 8 million specimens. Two million were already digitized, but that still leaves a whole lot of work to be done. Lohmann says they’re now averaging 1 million digitizations each year.

“ In five or six years, we’re going to have everything done,” she says. “And in the meantime we are also rethinking about, How can we tell the stories already? How can we make this information accessible in formats that are interesting for my high school girls or for somebody interested in horticulture? And how can we make this really a hub of plant knowledge that is interesting and dynamic and accessible to everyone.” 

The goal, in the end, isn’t just to bring St. Louis to MoBOT—although that’s a big part of it. But it’s also to bring that little girl growing up in Sao Paolo who’s obsessed with plants to MoBOT, and therefore to St. Louis as well. After all, as Lohmann notes, MoBOT’s international reputation makes it in some ways “a window to the world from St. Louis.” And when the world sees what St. Louis is doing, she believes the world will be interested in coming to St. Louis.

“Digitizing is like the little carrot, which is sort of, Look at all the cool things that are available here,” Lohmann explains. “And when we look at a specimen, you just see the image, but you don’t see the plant anatomy, you don’t see the chemistry, you don’t see the genomics, you don’t see the details. So I’m hoping that by making all that available, people will come with more focused goals for their visits.”

And someday, who knows, one of those visitors might end up in the president’s house within the garden, where Lúcia Lohmann now lives. It wouldn’t be the first time.

Watch the full interview with Lohmann on The 314 Podcast.