The new deputy director of the Botanical Garden is Olga Mayoral, graduate and PhD in Biology, lecturer of the Department of Experimental and Social Sciences Teaching of the Faculty of Education (Universitat de València) and appointed researcher at the Botanical Garden since December 2018. She has been collaborating and organising activities with the Garden for many years. She has a solid education and experience as a botanist, focused on Floristics and conservation, and she is interested in the use and possibilities of teaching outside the classroom in all educational levels. She is the coordinator of the Specialisation in Biology and Geography in the Master’s Degree in Secondary Education Teaching (UV) and the study group RCC-Harvard ‘Teaching and learning science in outdoor environments (TeLeSOE)’ with Arnold Arboretum, from Harvard University. Currently, she is also part of a research team focused on the inclusion of sustainability in the training process of the teachers and the inclusion of health education, with a special interest in environmental health.

Mayoral has accepted the appointment knowingly of the huge responsibility it entails ‘I’m eager to start bolstering the educational section, in which the Botanical Garden has worked so much, without leaving Botany aside.’ She claims that the interest and study of plants, ‘is disappearing in the university despite the fact that society does embrace it. The Garden is a privileged resource to restart its prominence and bring botany closer to the students of biology and other totally different disciplines.’

With this appointment, the director of the Botanical Garden, Jaime Güemes, aims to rescue the possibilities of the Garden in the education of teachers, so they can teach their students consequently. An objective that takes part in one of the lines of programming with which Güemes ran for director and which is to open the Garden to the university community to regain its original role as a space of university education. Along with this objective, Mayoral will also have an important role in the achievement of more objectives as to improve the informative, educational and expository offer, to value the scientific collections of the Garden, to boost relations with other research centres and to promote the research activity about botany in the centre.

The Botanical Garden of the Universitat de València was founded in 1567 as an orchard of medicinal plants linked to the studies of Medicine of the Universitat. In 1802, the orchard moved to ‘l’Hort de Tramoieres’, its actual location, near the Quart Towers. During the 19^th century and most of the 20^th century it was used to teach botany and to carry out experiences of acclimatisation of plants. In the late 20^th century, after a period of abandonment, in 1987 begins a process of restauration, led by Manuel Costa, which ended with the inauguration of a new research building in the 2000. The Botanical Garden of the Universitat de València is dedicated to the research of vegetal diversity, the conservation of rare, endangered or endemic species, the Mediterranean flora and the conservation of natural habitats. To complete the duties asked for the ‘Estatuts’ of the Universitat as a research, educational and cultural centre, offers an intense educational activity, mostly destined to children and which is completed by a diverse cultural and informative programming.