Herbaria and botanical gardens have a tightly entwined history.  Luca Ghini, an early proponent of documenting plants by pressing and preserving them, was also director of the first botanic garden at the university in Pisa where he taught materia medica to future physicians.  He took his students into the garden to learn about plants and also used specimens so they would be able to identify both living and dried plants.  The latter were useful when teaching during the winter months when fresh material wasn’t available, hence an early name for an herbarium was hortus hyemalis or winter garden.  This connection between herbaria and gardens continued and broadened as the study of plants moved beyond medicine.  There are plant collections documenting what was growing in the Oxford University garden at the time of Jacob Bobart in the seventeenth century and of Herman Boerhaave in the eighteenth century at Leiden.  After the taxonomic innovations of Carl Linnaeus, herbaria became even more essential to research, and they moved beyond educational institutions to become part of gardens that were in essence governmental institutions such as the Jardin des Plantes in Paris and the Royal Botanic Gardens, Kew.  At its inception, the Smithsonian Institution included both living and preserved plants from the Wilkes Expedition.  In all these instances, herbaria also developed as important hubs for plant science research.  While not all botanical gardens have herbaria, many of them do, and more are beginning to preserve material at least from their own living collections.  In the 21st century, the role of these gardens is changing, becoming more focused on efforts to identify and preserve biodiversity, and to support sustainable horticulture and agriculture around the world.  There are cases where the only living representatives of a species are in gardens.  In some cases, these are being propagated to be grown in their home ranges.  There are also efforts to build research infrastructures, including herbaria, particularly in the global South, to establish the same synergy between living and preserved specimens that has been so successful throughout the history of botany.  Gardens and herbaria both are seeking to broaden involvement in their work with outreach efforts to the larger community.  While many people visit gardens for the restorative pleasure they provide, few are aware of the research going on at many of them, and the important role herbaria play in that work.  Just as Luca Ghini saw a close connection between living and preserved plants, the goal is to make the vital interplay between them become better known.  Many of these herbaria now sponsor community science projects where volunteers input label data and mount specimens.  Making the various aspects of botanical gardens more familiar makes them more vibrant, and the idea of dead plants being vital to the study of the green world becomes better known and appreciated.