Botanical gardens present a potential solution to the paucity of functional data for underrepresented plant taxa. The diverse living collections housed in botanic gardens represent roughly 30% of all plant species ^[1] and provide researchers with easy access to thousands of species from all over the world with diverse life and evolutionary histories. Botanic gardens also often have in-house laboratories and are associated with universities and other research institutions, thus allowing scientists to overcome many of the infrastructural difficulties associated with acquiring functional trait data for tropical forest species in situ. In this review, I show that despite their potential value, botanic gardens remain grossly underused for studying the functional ecology of plants. The review discusses the benefits and potential biases of botanic gardens for academicians and researchers.