seeds are collected from the wild, with verification levels close to 100%. Many of the architectural, landscape architectural and infrastructure components of Oman Botanic Garden are currently under design or construction, at varying levels of completion, while the plant collection is being grown. The Oman Botanic Garden is not only Oman's leading institution of National Plant Collections, but is already regarded as one of the world's most interesting botanic gardens. Oman Botanic Garden staff The current staff structure consists of five departments: Botany and Conservation, Living Collections, Education and Communication, Operations, and Corporate Services. To date, the garden employs 80 staff, including four international experts and 76 Omani nationals. Several of the team are recruits from the local village, enabling the involvement of the local community with the project and helping to ensure that the benefits and information about the project are shared - an important aspect of the project's sustainability focus. Plants collections in Oman Botanic Garden The plant collections of the Oman Botanic Garden include living plants in the nursery, seeds in the seed bank and preserved plants in the herbarium. The plants currently grown in the nursery represent the largest scientific and documented collection of Arabian Plants on earth. Only very few of the plants of Oman have been propagated or cultivated before, so the work of the nursery is greatly increasing the knowledge and understanding of the country's flora. The Oman Botanic Garden botanist and horticulture teams collect plants as seeds and cuttings through regular field trips; hundreds of expeditions have taken placeto all areas and habitats of the country to collect, monitor and record invaluable data about Oman's plants and habitats. The majority of the native plants of Oman which will be planted in the Oman Botanic Garden are not available commercially. Therefore, the botany team has spent thousands of days on field expeditions to collect seed and other plant material to build up the collection. Seeds are collected and the plants are propagated for the first time ever at the Oman Botanic Garden nursery. The overall vision of the habitat gardens is to represent a specific habitat at its best. A habitat design is not a formal design, but rather provides a true representation of the plants in their natural environments. The native plants of Oman will also be used in the amenity areas of the garden, outside of the habitats, to showcase the