A 17C Ottoman garden party hosted by the Queen Mother (Valide Sultan) for Madame Girardin, wife of the French ambassador. Bibliotheque Nationale, Paris, France.
Egypt
The development of Western botanical gardens can be traced to ancient Egypt, where the development of the garden served for both ornamental use & for the collection of useful edible & medicinal plants. Health was one of the most important functions of the pharaohs. Both physicians & magicians participated in the field of medical care. They conceived of health & sickness as an unceasing fight between good & evil. According to historical records, Ancient Egyptians involved in the medical & healing plant arts used to recite certain incantations while preparing or administering medications. They were also familiar with drug preparation from plants & herbs such as cumin, fennel, caraway, aloe, safflower, glue, pomegranates, castor & linseed oil.
In the period of the New Kingdom (16th to 11thC BCE), the garden was a symmetrical, walled sanctuary. The Egyptians had no known landscaping precedent to emulate, & they created their own sort of formalism. Based on ceramic shards & tomb paintings, typical homes were constructed around an unroofed courtyard filled with trees. In some homes a 2nd courtyard contained more trees, providing shade & fruit, & perhaps a vegetable patch & a vine shaded a work area.
A significant contribution of the ancient Egyptians was the recognition of plants as healing agents. The Ebers Papyrusis a compilation of earlier works that contains a large number of plant-based drug recipes. The 3,500-year-old papyrus discovered by George Ebers in 1874 reveals that the Egyptians had identified over 800 medicinally active plants that they used in their landscapes. The Edwin Smith Papyrus & the Ebers Papyrus date from the 17th & 16th centuries BCE. These manuscripts are believed to be derived from earlier sources. The later Kahun Papyrus, The Berlin Medical Papyrus, The London Medical Papyrus. & The Hearst Medical Papyrus repeat many of the recipes found in the Ebers Papyrus.
The pharaohs were horticulturally sophisticated & were continually on the search for useful new plants. They returned from military campaigns with exotic trees to be grown in the temple gardens. In 1500 BCE, Queen Hatshepsut is reported to have organized a plant expedition to northeastern Africa, the Land of Punt, & which returned with living myrrh trees that were planted in the terraced gardens of her temple at Deir el-Bahri. Her nephew, Thothmes III, carved curious plants brought from Syria upon the walls of the Temple of Amun at Karnak that included iris & squirting cucumber. Egyptian theories & practices influenced the Greeks, who furnished many of the physicians in the Roman Empire, & through them Arab & European medical thinking for centuries to come.
Persia
The walled garden reappeared in the 9th century BCE in Persia, where the Medes & later the Archaemenians established lush irrigated landscapes in a form that came to be known as pairidaēza, “a wall enclosing a garden or orchard,” from which the word paradise is derived. Given its central placement along the trade routes to China, India, & Arabia, Persia these gardens were ideally suited for the sale & expropriation of exotic plants & for copy of their horticultural design which increased after Babylon was captured from Nebuchadnezzar in 583 BCE.
The Persian Empire stretched across the known world, its borders expanding to Greece & Egypt in the west & to India in the east. Based on the ongoing archeological excavation of Cyrus the Great’s palace at Pasargadae, the classical Persian garden has been shown to echo elements of the earlier Egyptian form: it was designed as an integral component of the overall architecture, protected by 4 walls, & divided by irrigated rills.
A major advancement that the Persians adopted was the use of aqueducts for irrigation. These water channels for irrigation are the antecedent for the four-square garden, & these watercourses formed the principal axis & secondary axes of the main garden at Pasargadae. After the Islamic takeover of Persia in the7C, this garden type became known as the chahar bagh, literally a garden of 4. In Islamic cosmology, a cross divided the universe into 4 quarters & a spring that brought forth all life lay in its center, which is strikingly similar to biblical descriptions of the Garden of Eden, which was purported to have 4 rivers flowing forth from it.
Greece
The Greeks devoted considerable attention to agriculture & crop plants. Although the botanical writings of Aristotle (384–422 BCE) are lost, those of his most famous student & successor Theophrastus of Eresos (371–286 BCE) survive. Theophrastus eventually became head of the Lyceum, successor to Plato’s Academy, & his students numbered over 2,000.
We know little about the gardens in the Grove of Academe in Athens, but from the many plants mentioned by students & correspondents it may be considered a precursor of the European botanical garden. His two famous botanical works, History of Plants & Causes of Plants, examin such topics as plant classification, propagation, geographic botany, forestry, horticulture, pharmacology, viticulture, plant pests, & flavors & odors. These descriptive works are not strictly scientific, but allowed Theophrastus to be called the Father of Botany, because they influenced botanical thinking until the Renaissance in Europe.
Romans
Columella. The Romans were more interested in practical agriculture than botanical science & were absorbed with horticultural technology. Columella devoted Book 10 of his World of the Countryside to a long poem on the merits of gardening & Book 11 to practical gardening advice.
Pliny the Elder (AD 23/24-79) According to Pliny the Elder (Naturalis Historia, XX), Antonius Castor, who lived in Rome in the1st century, had a botanical garden in which he “cultivated vast numbers of plants with the greatest care.” Gaius Plinius Secundus, called Pliny the Elder, was a Roman author, a naturalist & natural philosopher, a naval & army commander of the early Roman Empire, & a friend of emperor Vespasian. He wrote the encyclopedic Naturalis Historia, which became an editorial model for later encyclopedias.
The classical Roman garden was a private sanctuary built within a courtyard defined by a series of columns & associated entablature. However, within these courtyards, the planted beds usually surrounded a central pool that featured many types of purely ornamental plants. From Pliny the Younger, we know that among these were roses, laurels, boxwoods, acanthus, oleander, iris, hyacinth, marguerite, pansy, narcissus, anemone, carnation, foxglove, violet, gladiolus, & jasmine.
As the Roman Empire expanded, the ornamental plants included novel species from foreign lands. In their rural villas, the Romans perfected the use of stone benches, marble statuary, & grottoes in their gardens, but a key feature was water in many forms, from pools to irrigation channels to fountains. Roman engineering enabled them to bring water into their gardens from great distances via a sophisticated system of aqueducts.
These ancient gardens included some characteristics associated with later European botanical gardens. These include the walled gardens, offering protected sanctuary, gardens planted in organized space, & stressing the cultivation of plants as agents of healing.
