Botanic Gardens

By Sarah Rutherford

Across the world hundreds of botanic gardens combine scientific research, conservation and beauty with public access, with Kew Gardens alone attracting around one million visitors a year. For centuries they have variously focused on cultivating medicinal and exotic plants, introducing lucrative crops such as tea and rubber to new countries, preserving international plant collections, scientific classification and research – or have combined all these things. Sarah Rutherford here tells their story from the sixteenth-century up to their long heyday in the last two hundred years. She explains the gardens' design and architecture, the personalities and institutions associated with them, their important role in research and conservation, and their appeal to millions of visitors.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Bloomsbury Publishing
• Release date: Feb 10, 2015
• ISBN: 9781784420536

Sarah Rutherford

Sarah Rutherford is an enthusiastic garden historian and Kew-trained gardener. She has a passion for Capability Brown and his landscape gardens and has visited and studied many to understand the man and his legendary capabilities. As a consultant she has been preparing conservation plans for over twelve years for all sorts of historic parks and gardens. She has written books on subjects as diverse as Victorian Asylums, Georgian Garden Buildings and Botanic Gardens.

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The earliest botanic garden in Britain, Oxford, was founded in 1621. It is still used for plant research, education and conservation as well as being a beautiful garden.

INTRODUCTION: A LIVING LABORATORY

WITHOUT PLANTS OUR world is nothing. Plants are essential to life. And so since prehistoric times mankind has gardened enthusiastically, and for many reasons. In particular since the flowering of the European Renaissance, the botanic garden has played a unique role, combining plant science with horticulture. It is not just a scientific institution for the study of botany in living and preserved plants, but has a parallel artistic and social purpose too. As a living laboratory it provides plant material for study and crucial refuge for endangered species via plants and seeds; it is also a charming ornamental garden that welcomes visitors and introduces them to myriad forms of the plant world. The scientific plant collection is organised for botanical research and education purposes and displayed with artistry and horticultural skill. This book describes the development and shifting purposes of botanic gardens, from their medical origins in the universities of Renaissance Italy to their current role worldwide as vibrant scientific, conservation and educational institutions, including Britain’s pivotal role in their history.

The botanic garden originated early in the Scientific Revolution (c. 1550–1700), in 1540s northern Italy, as an educational and medical institution, before spreading across Europe. By 1850, botanic gardens had spread worldwide, when many were used for disseminating and testing growing conditions for medicinal plants (e.g. cinchona for quinine) and crops (e.g. cotton, coffee, rubber), particularly in the colonial tropics. They displayed specialist and unusual collections and were laid out for visitors. By 1900 the Royal Botanic Gardens, Kew, had become the foremost of these botanic gardens worldwide and are now a World Heritage Site for their significant and uninterrupted contribution to the study of plant diversity and economic botany, as is their forerunner the 1540s Padua Horto Botanico in Italy. Over the last century the role of the botanic garden has shifted from the search for economic crops towards a dual emphasis on practical conservation and public education, while retaining its remit for botanical study.

Botanic-garden botanists undertook long and arduous collecting trips. Joseph Hooker’s remarkable journey for Kew to India, 1848–50, discovered many tropical orchids of the Sikkim Himalaya. Dendrobium hookeriana (1873).

Today botanic gardens and arboreta form a thriving worldwide network, as vital repositories of biodiversity and botanical scholarship. Over three thousand are associated with the plant conservation charity Botanic Gardens Conservation International, which promotes their work in conservation and public education. Botanic gardens retain a crucial role in our future understanding of major environmental issues such as food security, ecological restoration and adaptation to climate change.

A typical botanic garden will have particular features to fulfill its scientific, ornamental, conservation and educational roles. The scientific facilities can include a herbarium, library and botanical laboratories as well as museums, seed banks, display and service glasshouses and other horticultural and ornamental buildings. These serve the botanists and receive plant material from collecting expeditions. A house for the superintendent or director is often provided, sometimes with other houses, lodges, visitor centre and refreshment buildings. Sculpture may also be a feature. The larger establishments run training schemes for gardeners including Kew, Edinburgh and Wisley in the United Kingdom, with educational facilities for their students. Most have educational programmes and facilities for schools and the general public.

Botanic gardens developed from medieval monastic and herbalists’ gardens. A storeroom aided preparation of the plants and contained storage jars for the materia medica (remedies).

Botanic gardens helped to disseminate key crops throughout the tropics in the nineteenth century, including coffee.