Ancient Egyptian Botanical Garden. Relief in the Karnak Temple Complex in Luxor, Egypt.
The Journal of the American Medical Association Volume LXV July-December, 1915 Chicago
A HISTORY OF BOTANIC GARDENS
One of the stock figures of ancient & primitive medicine is the herb gatherer, the £ifoT6fios (rhizototnus) of the Greeks & Romans, who made his living by wandering about through forest & meadow, collecting medicinal roots & herbs & selling them. The herbal medicine of primitive man was, in fact, the origin of our therapeutics, & was frequently delegated to the so-called "wise women." These beldames, as the old dramatists show, would sometimes enlarge the sphere of their activities to embrace the triple functions of fortune teller, procuress & abortionist.
The word "drug" is derived from the Anglo Saxon verb drigatr, to dry, referring to the dried collections of simples which were for a long time a medical commodity. The herbalists & drug sellers were naturally concerned to monopolize their business, & in order to frighten away the ignorant from collecting such plants for themselves, they encouraged & even invented superstitions to impose on the masses.
To protect the doctor & the apothecary from these abuses, there arose the necessity of growing plants in special gardens set apart for the purpose, & these naturally clustered around the monasteries. From these monastic gardens it was but a step to the botanic & physic gardens of the medieval & Renaissance universities.
The earliest garden known & represented was that of Thotmes III (1000 B. C), planned by Nekht, head gardener of the Temple of Karnak; but the modern idea of a botanic garden, for economic & scientific purposes, seems to have originated with the Chinese & was known to the ancient Aztecs...
The earliest European botanic garden on record was the hortus at St. Gall (9C), with its herbularis or physic garden, the former of which was an oblong enclosure containing 18 rectangular beds, while the herbularis was square & near the doctor's house. Here the monks cultivated their fruits & vegetables, gathered their medicinal simples & studied them. The epoch-making work of Abbot Mendel in the monastic garden at Briinn was an offshoot of this idea.
The earliest botanic garden attached to a university was that at Pisa (1544), which owed its origin to the suggestion of Francesco Bonafede, who held the chair of simples (lectura simplicium) at the University of Padua (1533), that a botanic garden be started there. This came to pass in 1545, & among the prefects of the Paduan garden were the eminent botanists Anguillara & Prospero Alpini. About 1561, there was added to the Paduan teaching an ostensio simplicium or demonstration of living plants for the students.
The earliest garden known & represented was that of Thotmes III (1000 B. C), planned by Nekht, head gardener of the Temple of Karnak; but the modern idea of a botanic garden, for economic & scientific purposes, seems to have originated with the Chinese & was known to the ancient Aztecs...
The earliest European botanic garden on record was the hortus at St. Gall (9C), with its herbularis or physic garden, the former of which was an oblong enclosure containing 18 rectangular beds, while the herbularis was square & near the doctor's house. Here the monks cultivated their fruits & vegetables, gathered their medicinal simples & studied them. The epoch-making work of Abbot Mendel in the monastic garden at Briinn was an offshoot of this idea.
The earliest botanic garden attached to a university was that at Pisa (1544), which owed its origin to the suggestion of Francesco Bonafede, who held the chair of simples (lectura simplicium) at the University of Padua (1533), that a botanic garden be started there. This came to pass in 1545, & among the prefects of the Paduan garden were the eminent botanists Anguillara & Prospero Alpini. About 1561, there was added to the Paduan teaching an ostensio simplicium or demonstration of living plants for the students.
John Ray, the English botanist, visited both these places, describing the Paduan physic garden as "well-stored," the Pisan as "meanly stored" with simples. Zurich acquired a botanic garden in 1560, & was followed by Bologna (1568), Leiden (1587), Leipzig (1579) & Paris (1597), the latter being the original of the Jardin des Plantes (1635).
John Gerard, of the famous "Herball" of 1597, catalogued in his physic garden at Holborn in 1596, listing 1,030 plants, the first catalogue printed. The Jardin des Plantes had about 1,800 species under cultivation in 1636, & 4,000 in 1665. Heidelberg had a garden before 1600, and, in the seventeenth century, gardens were established at Giessen (1605), Strassburg (1620), Oxford (1621), Jena (1629), Upsala (1657), Chelsea (1673), Berlin (1679), Edinburgh (1680) & Amsterdam (1682).
Private physic gardens were owned in England by Thomas Johnson at Snowhill (1633), by John Parkinson, apothecary to James I, & John Tradescant, whose private collection of curiosities became the present Ashmolean Museum at Oxford. The land for the Oxford garden was given by the Earl of Danby, & a greenhouse or conservatory was put up in 1670.
Private physic gardens were owned in England by Thomas Johnson at Snowhill (1633), by John Parkinson, apothecary to James I, & John Tradescant, whose private collection of curiosities became the present Ashmolean Museum at Oxford. The land for the Oxford garden was given by the Earl of Danby, & a greenhouse or conservatory was put up in 1670.
The Edinburgh garden was founded by the physicians Sir Robert Sibbald & Sir Andrew Balfour, "to safeguard the Practitioner against the Herbalist & to enable him to have a correct knowledge of the plants which were the source of the drugs he himself would have to compound."
The Chelsea Physic Garden, founded as the Garden of the Society of Apothecaries in London (1673), was originally at Westminster, but was moved to Chelsea in 1776, the freehold having been purchased for the society by Sir Hans Sloane in 1712 & conveyed to it by deed in 1722. The heating arrangement of its greenhouses by a vaulted subterranean plant was an innovation, noted by Evelyn in his diary in 1685.
At the end of the 18C, there were about 1,600 botanic gardens in Europe, including Petrograd (1713), Vienna (1754), Kew (1759), Cambridge (1762), Madrid (1763), Coimbra (1773) & the Glasnevin Garden of the Royal Dublin Society (1790). Tropical & subtropical gardens existed at St. Vincent (1764), Calcutta (-1786) & Sydney (1788).
The lovely Kew Gardens was originally a royal preserve first in charge of William Aiton, & afterward of Sir Joseph Banks, who made it an unrivaled center "of botanical exploration & horticultural experiment."
The first botanic garden in America was established by John Bartram at Philadelphia in 1728. It was followed by the Elgin Botanical Garden, founded by David Hosack (1801), which became the Botanic Garden of New York State (1810), acquiring the celebrated herbariums of Torrey, Chapman & Meisner; & the fine & complete Botanic Garden of Harvard University (1805), which, with the Gray Herbarium (1864) & the Arnold Arboretum (1872), is "a Mecca for botanists all the world over."
Also from the 19C, the tropical & subtropical gardens at Penang (1801-1884) & Singapore (1823-1878), which are associated with the name of Sir Stamford Raffles were founded, also those of Rio de Janeiro (1808), Buitzenorg, Java (1817), Cape Town (1848), Durban, Natal (1853), the restoration of the St. Vincent garden (1890), the National Botanic Garden of South Africa at Kirstenbosch (1913), & many flourishing gardens in Australia, Tasmania & New Zealand.
In addition to the American gardens already mentioned, those at Berkeley, Cal., University of Pennsylvania (Philadelphia), Smith College, Northampton, Mass., the Michigan Agricultural College (1877), the Medicinal Plant Garden of the College of Pharmacy of the University of Minnesota at Minneapolis (1910-1911), & the Wisconsin Pharmaceutical Experiment Station (1913) are of special interest in university teaching. The Missouri Botanical Garden at St. Louis, founded by Henry Shaw in 1889 is closely connected with the Shaw School of Botany of Washington University.
