

BOTANIC GARDENS

Sarah Rutherford

A tropical _Tibouchina_ painted by Walter Fitch for _Curtis's Botanical Magazine_ , 1868. A seminal publication by Kew Gardens, begun in 1787, _Curtis's_ is the longest running botanical periodical featuring colour illustrations of plants.

The botanist Joseph Banks's dedication to George III's daughter Princess Elizabeth (1814), exquisitely decorated by Banks's botanical illustrator Franz Bauer with symbolic and exotic flowers. 'His' flower, the Banksia (bottom right), was his Australian introduction in 1788, along with the Bird-of-Paradise from South Africa in 1773. Banks was the early mastermind behind the Royal Botanic Gardens, Kew, London.

## CONTENTS

INTRODUCTION: A LIVING LABORATORY

THE FIRST BOTANIC GARDENS: PHYSIC GARDENS IN EUROPE

THE BLOSSOMING OF BRITISH BOTANIC GARDENS

COLONIAL BOTANIC GARDENS

THE UNITED STATES OF AMERICA

THE TWENTIETH CENTURY: EDUCATION AND CONSERVATION

WHAT MAKES A BOTANIC GARDEN?

PLACES TO VISIT

FURTHER READING

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.

Botanic gardens remain relevant and form a vibrant network today. One of the most recent is the National Botanic Garden of Wales (2000).

## THE FIRST BOTANIC GARDENS: PHYSIC GARDENS IN EUROPE

THE FIRST TRUE botanic gardens were scientific university institutions set up in the 1540s, early in the European Renaissance, in the quest for experimental data. The earliest ones, known then as physic gardens, were founded in the northern Italian states by established universities at the heart of new ideas of scientific enquiry, to grow medicinal plants for identification and study by medical students. This scientific study of medicinal drugs and their sources, preparation, and use was known as the _materia medica_ , when botany was merely ancillary to medicine.

The botanic garden has its origins in the tradition of the medieval monastic physic garden, which provided medicinal plants as the basis for remedies (also known as 'simples'). The medicinal garden gradually shifted into the idea of a garden with a more rigorous scientific and educational purpose. In the mid-fifteenth century Pope Nicholas V had a famous garden in the Vatican, Rome, to promote the teaching of botany as a branch of medicine. This seems to have been the only one of its kind in Europe for a century and the distinction between this garden and later botanic gardens is a fine one. Possibly the idea of scientific collections of plants was suggested to Europeans by Montezuma's extensive gardens of fragrant shrubs, flowers and medicinal plants, which astonished the Spanish Conquistadores in Aztec Mexico. Whatever the influences, Italian botanic gardens heralded the ferment of ideas that drove the extraordinary advancement of science that still influences us today, quickly moving beyond mere medical education in an attempt to understand and explain man and the natural world.

The renowned German botanist Leonhart Fuchs published one of the most influential herbals, _De Historia Stirpium_ , in 1542, just as the first true botanic gardens were about to be created.

A group of scientific gardens emerged in northern Italy from the 1540s, attached to established university medical schools at a time when many plants were thought to have therapeutic properties. Initially the gardens provided living plants of medicinal value for demonstrations to the medical students, but soon other sorts of plants were acquired, especially rarities and those newly brought back from distant lands, developing the science of botany. The gardens became renowned for, as botanist John Ray called them, 'prefects, men eminent for their skill in Botanics'.

The first botanic gardens formed a cluster of three pioneering university gardens that survive today. The first such _Orto Botanico_ was in the Florentine state of Pisa (1544) and was founded by the statesman Cosimo de' Medici. Its designer and first director was the botanist Luca Ghini. Padua, then part of the Venetian state, quickly followed in 1545, together with Florence. The layout at Florence, again for Medici, was by Niccolò (called ' _Il Tribolo_ '), who had planned several other grand ducal gardens, including that at Medici's celebrated villa at Castello near Florence. Initially the Florentine gardens were directed by Ghini. In 1568 a fourth botanic garden was founded at Bologna, part of the Papal States, for the oldest university in the world, by Ulisse Aldovrandi, influenced by Ghini and Padua. The gardens exchanged plants and seeds, herbarium specimens, drawings and paintings.

The early botanic garden was limited in size, in part because of its urban position adjacent to the university. Typical of other contemporary Italian gardens, elegance and taste in layout were essential, also serving science and combining with it, so the garden was laid out ornamentally with many geometric beds divided by paths, following Italian fashion. It was enclosed by the university buildings or substantial garden walls to exclude intruders and prevent thefts of valuable or rare plants.

Padua (1545), one of the earliest botanic gardens, was uniquely circular. It is of worldwide importance as a cradle of science, scientific exchange and the relationship between nature and culture.

Padua was, and remains, outstanding. Most obviously it is unique in its circular plan, where its contemporaries were square or rectangular. The garden, some 80 metres across, was surrounded in the 1550s by a tall stone wall with four great gateways to the main paths. The central square quarters had elaborate geometric patterns of dozens of small beds, which gave ease of access to plants from the paths for students. These contained not just medicinal 'simples' but also rarities, including exotics from Asia Minor, Cyprus, and Egypt (e.g. Egyptian fig and _Diospyros lotus_ ). Even though Venice's trade interests lay in the East, the garden in Padua acquired novelties from others' voyages of discovery to the New World (e.g. pepper, sunflower and tobacco). A published list of 1591 gives 1,168 plants, but probably these were not all present at the same time. The plants were often set out to reflect the order in which they were discussed in textbooks. The same species was planted more than once so that students did not all crowd around a single specimen and each could have a cutting or entire plant for study that could be pressed and dried like a herbarium specimen.

The influence of these pioneers quickly spread to northern European universities. Many founded their own botanic gardens with herbaria, including the _Hortus Botanicus_ at Leiden (1590), then Montpellier (1593), Copenhagen (1600), Paris (Jardin des Plantes, 1626), Amsterdam (1638), Uppsala (1650s), with several in Germany including Berlin (1670s), and latterly in Russia (St Petersburg, 1713). Links between early botanic gardens were strong as the botanists and professors moved posts between them and formed a network of professional acquaintance and exchanges of plant material.

Leiden (1590), like many early botanic gardens, was at the heart of the university quarter, part of the medical faculty and, in this case, overlooked by the anatomy school.

The botanists in charge often made major contributions to botany. Carolus Clusius was the first prefect of Leiden. Using his worldwide contacts, he acquired an extensive plant collection, assisted by the Dutch East India Company, which sent both plants and dried specimens. On its original tiny square plot ( _c_. 35 metres by 40 metres), with each quarter for plants of one of the four continents, he grew over one thousand different plants. At Montpellier, on the southern French coast, the professor of botany and anatomy Pierre Richer de Belleval founded for Henry IV a cradle of modern botany. This 2-acre garden was influenced by the Italian examples and in turn became the model for other French botanic gardens, including the Jardin des Plantes some thirty-three years later.

The advent of printing in the 1450s stimulated the study of many and diverse Renaissance subjects, especially botany. From as early as 1470 printed herbals described the various plants available via text and woodcut illustrations. As well as being botanical guides, they provided information on the curative effects of plants.

The first clear, systematic survey of English plants was by William Turner, known as the Father of English Botany. Turner's influential work _A New Herball, wherin are conteyned the names of herbes..._ (1551–68) had fine woodcuts (mainly copied from the German botanist Leonhart Fuchs's 1542 _De Historia Stirpium_ ) and detailed observations based on his own field studies, making it much more reliable than earlier works. This was the first herbal published in English, which enabled easy identification of the main English plants. Another in the long line of influential illustrated catalogues of plants was John Gerard's The _Herball_ , _or Generall Historie of Plantes_ (1597). This was based on a translation of the Flemish physician and botanist Rembert Dodoens's widely disseminated _Herbal_ (1554), and helped to spread botanical knowledge and medical uses of plants. Libraries became essential to the work of botanic gardens and many acquired extensive collections of publications and archives. Many botanic gardens printed lists of their own plants as catalogues.

Botanical interest widened from common medicinal plants to exotic introductions, inspired by increasing exploration and trade beyond Europe, while botany gradually moved into a separate discipline from medicine. The range of plants grown widened to those from eastern Europe and the Near East, and from western Asia, which provided many bulbs such as tulips from Turkey, as well as New World plants from the Americas, including potatoes, tomatoes and sunflowers.

Montpellier (1593), the earliest French botanic garden, influenced others in France including the Parisian Jardin des Plantes.

## THE BLOSSOMING OF BRITISH BOTANIC GARDENS

BRITAIN, ALTHOUGH NOT at the forefront of institutional botanic gardens, had since Tudor times developed a tradition of private botanical collections. These included William Turner's gardens at Kew and Wells, and John Gerard's at Holborn, whose catalogue in 1596 listed 1,030 plants. Still more famous was the pioneering collection of plants in the Lambeth garden of the two John Tradescants, father and son, many collected from the wild by themselves during expeditions abroad in the late sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries. These plants were housed alongside their extraordinary collection of objects that later formed the basis for the Ashmolean Museum in Oxford. In the 1780s William Curtis was perhaps the first to create an independent botanic garden with the emphasis on British native flora. He displayed the plants using the Linnaean system described below and opened his gardens in Lambeth and Brompton by subscription to professionals and interested amateurs. In 1787 he began his finely illustrated _Botanical Magazine_ , which is still published today. Unfortunately the future of these private gardens was vulnerable without an institution to support them, and they all vanished.

At Oxford, Stuart Britain caught up with European university botanic gardens with the first British example, initially called a physic garden. By now 'physic' had a wider meaning beyond medical science, and a physic garden was a scientific garden not necessarily connected with drugs. Oxford Physic Garden was founded in 1621 by Henry Danvers, first Earl of Danby, as a teaching facility for the university's medical faculty and to contain 'curious' plants, with the huge sum of £5,000 (equivalent to about £3.5 million today). Its riverside site, some 115 metres by 100 metres, just outside the city walls adjacent to three great colleges, was built up above the river with '4,000 loads of mucke and dunge' (from the college cesspits). Like its Italian forebears, the garden was laid out in quarters with many beds, divided by paths lined by topiary yews. The 2-acre site was 'beautifully walled and gated', with a high stone wall and gateways as fine as those in the great country houses. Its magnificent entrance gateway by the master mason Nicholas Stone contained a bust of Danvers, and was completed in 1633.

The first superintendent proposed for Oxford was John Tradescant the Elder but he died without taking up the position. Instead, the job of _Horti Praefectus_ went in _c._ 1641–2 to Jacob Bobart the Elder, an eccentric retired soldier of the German wars, and a very capable gardener and botanist, who kept the Greyhound Inn opposite the garden. Developed by Bobart, the garden gained a reputation and was visited by many distinguished people, including John Evelyn and Samuel Pepys. Bobart the Elder printed his own catalogue of plants growing in the garden in 1648, listing 1,600 types, with a surprising number of Canadian plants. Either he or his son, also Jacob and successor to his father at Oxford, had a copy of the 1591 Padua botanising book (now at Kew), in which he noted the plants he saw there.

Oxford superintendent Jacob Bobart's copy of the 1591 Padua botanising book. The blank boxes for students' observations on plants are partly filled in. Plans identify the numbered beds in the complex layout.

Oxford Physic Garden (1621), the first British university botanic garden. Though square, it resembled the circular Padua in its scale, formality and ornamental character.

The younger Bobart botanised widely in Europe. He sent his list of seeds collected in the garden to other gardens, suggesting that seeds should be exchanged. It was a forerunner of the seed lists now published worldwide by botanic gardens for seed exchange. Like its earliest European forebears, the garden still thrives, and, known since 1840 as Oxford Botanic Garden, it boasts that it is the most compact, yet diverse, collection of plants in the world.

Two other significant botanic gardens were set up in the same century. Scotland played a key part in training doctors and botanists and its first botanic garden had an early role in this. The Royal Botanic Garden Edinburgh was founded in 1670 next to Holyrood Palace, as a 'Physic Garden' for the cultivation of medicinal plants, by doctors Robert Sibbald (later Professor of Medicine at Edinburgh University) and Andrew Balfour. Like many early botanic gardens, it had a small urban site – with much pressure for development and no scope to expand – and moved several times, finally in 1820 to its present 70-acre site in Inverleith.

Chelsea Physic Garden (1673), London, was founded by the Society of Apothecaries rather than by a university.

Chelsea Physic Garden was founded in 1673 by the Society of Apothecaries as a private teaching and research garden, to train apprentices to identify plants and to study the science of botany. Like Oxford, its mild riverside position by the Thames and sheltering walls created a microclimate that allowed semi-tender exotic plants to be grown and overwinter outdoors. Both Chelsea and Oxford had early greenhouses for tender plants. Chelsea has occupied this 4-acre site ever since, while urban London engulfed its rural setting. This garden's golden age occurred in the forty-eight years from 1722 to 1770 under its curator Philip Miller, during the time of a flood of plant introductions from America. Among other achievements, Miller published his widely read _Dictionary of Gardening_ (1731), and in 1732 sent cotton seeds from which much of America's cotton is descended to the new American colony of Georgia. By the 1750s the gardens were considered among the finest in Europe, rivalling the botanic gardens of Paris and Leiden, and Miller firmly set its course for the future. In the 1830s Nathaniel Ward here devised the Wardian case, a portable greenhouse and a great breakthrough in transporting plants alive. The many successful plant movements across the world that this device enabled included the introduction of the tea plant to India by Robert Fortune, and of quinine from South America to Kew and on to India.

Dahlias were introduced from Spanish colonial Mexico to Madrid in 1798. These, with many other exotics introduced via botanic gardens, were bred to become staples of Victorian bedding schemes.

From 1700 an increasing flood of new plants arrived into Britain and Europe from across the world, spurred by the huge increase in maritime trade and colonisation. These exotics went not just to botanic gardens but also to gardens of wealthy connoisseurs and nurserymen. Hardy woody species came largely from North America. Only with the development of glasshouse design and technology could tender novelties be reliably cultivated and propagated. New tender species became popular garden plants, such as dahlias from South America and _Pelargoniums_ (bedding geraniums) from the Cape in South Africa. Many dedicated collectors contributed, including Joseph Banks, Joseph Hooker of Kew and David Douglas, returning with tales of adventures and some tragic deaths while collecting.

The father of modern botany, Swedish botanist Carl Linnaeus (1707–78). His Latin two-name system for plants is still used.

A combination of this deluge of plants and Enlightenment ideas led to the search for a more reliable and systematic approach to plant classification and nomenclature (naming). This had a profound effect on the work of botanic gardens. Reliable naming was essential to deal with myriad new species. The most significant development in botanical naming and classification was by the pre-eminent Swedish botanist Carl Linnaeus, while Director of Uppsala Botanic Garden. In his seminal work _Species Plantarum_ (1753) he suggested a Latin two-name (or binomial) system comprising the genus and then the species, basing the arrangement of plants on the shared characteristics of their flower structure. The binomial system was adopted and remains the basis for plant naming today, although DNA sequencing of genetic material has superseded the flower structure as the basis for relationships. Each newly identified and named plant had a typical or 'type' specimen; this was the particular herbarium specimen from which the description and name were derived, as the reference point to identify others. This today remains the naming system used by taxonomists: specialists in systematic botany, classifying and naming plants.

The network of botanic gardens increased both in Europe and worldwide, fed by the inundation of plant introductions but also driven in many cases by colonial economics. Planting schemes reflected botanical classification systems, including Systematic or Order Beds to show relationships between plants, with ornamental features and structures: walls, conservatories and stove houses for tropical plants, and back sheds and service glasshouses.

Although Britain was slow to set up its first botanic gardens, it quickly caught up and blazed a trail in botanic study, setting up many botanic gardens at home and in its colonies worldwide in the nineteenth century. The Royal Botanic Gardens, Kew, on the River Thames near London became the most significant of these as the government's botanical clearing-house of the British Empire and the mother-ship of its colonial botanic gardens.

The botanic garden at Kew began in 1759, relatively late in the history of botanic gardens, in a modest and unassuming way and without great ambition, for a dowager Princess of Wales, Princess Augusta, mother of the future George III. A 9-acre area was set aside within her royal garden, on the banks of the Thames in Surrey, some 9 miles west of central London. It gradually expanded and a botanical collection was developed for her by the third Earl of Bute, an enthusiastic amateur botanist as well as a handsome politician and (briefly) Prime Minister. The gardener and botanist William Aiton came from Chelsea Physic Garden to manage the new 'Physick Garden', directed by the famous and influential botanist and plant collector Joseph Banks, who for nearly fifty years until 1820 established the garden as an outstanding botanical collection. From the first, intrepid gardeners were dispatched on extensive collecting trips to increase the collection. In 1772 Banks sent the gardener Francis Masson to the South African Cape to collect plants; in 1776 he went to the Canaries and Azores, and in 1779 to the West Indies. In 1773 a 'Catalogue of trees and shrubs in his Majesty's botanic collection at Kew' lists 177 genera and 791 species and varieties.

The Royal Botanic Gardens, Kew, was the most important of botanic gardens by 1900. The two huge Victorian glasshouses, the Temperate House and Palm House, dominate the garden.

Botanist father and son William and Joseph Hooker transformed the Royal Gardens at Kew from 1841 to 1885 into the foremost botanic garden, as a government-funded research institution. It became a worldwide hub for the exchange of botanical material, for scientific study, and the dissemination of plant material and gardeners to the British colonies; its herbarium was second to none. It was the model for many new botanic gardens, such as New York and Berlin-Dahlem. Kew opened to the public in 1839, and officially transferred to government management in 1840. The garden quickly became a great public amenity and by the 1860s the annual attendance figures reached half a million, with over a million in 1882. An admission fee of 1d was imposed for the first time in 1916 and turnstiles were installed. Today the 300-acre garden contains over 50,000 taxa (botanical groups) of living plants from all parts of the world, a herbarium of about six million specimens, an extensive collection of anatomical slides, about a million specimens of plant products, and a comprehensive reference library.

The first Director at Kew, Sir William Hooker (1785–1865). From 1841 he led the Royal Botanic Gardens into their pivotal worldwide botanical role.

Sir Joseph Hooker (1817–1911), second Director at Kew, 1865–85, following his father, Sir William. Both botanist and adminstrator, he identified over twelve thousand plant species and consolidated Kew as the most respected botanic garden in the world.

A new era of regional British botanic gardens opened with the blossoming of local learned societies funded by subscriptions or public funds, driven by men with intellectual curiosity and the means to indulge their interests. Generally the scientific aspects of locally funded botanic gardens were less well established than at the universities and funding was more precarious. Some gardens occupied individual sites; others were part of larger gardens. The public parks movement was also developing and some botanic gardens became botanical public display collections, leaving behind the research and scientific aspect of their true botanic purpose.

Dublin was an early example begun by a local learned society, the (now Royal) Dublin Society, directed by the Irish Parliament. In 1795 Glasnevin estate was bought, some 2 miles from Dublin Castle. The site was horticulturally unpromising, as its thin soil overlaid limestone. It was laid out systematically with an emphasis on useful types of plants such as grasses for agriculture, but with native and exotic plants to demonstrate the Linnaean system of classification, including a Hibernian Garden. Its future was assured when it was transferred to government control in 1877.

Liverpool, the first botanic garden funded by public subscription to a private society, influenced others in provincial towns and cities. It contained areas for rock plants (3) and bog plants (4), beds for botanical display (8), a grand conservatory (6), and a tropical stove house (2).

Some major advances in botanical studies resulted from new discoveries introduced via the port at Liverpool. Liverpool Botanic Garden was the first in the world to be developed by public subscription to a private society and was emulated by other large provincial towns and cities. It was opened in 1803 as a private botanic garden by a group of Liverpool botanists, including the celebrated William Roscoe. The 5-acre site was designed by the curator, John Shepherd, who published a catalogue of the plants in 1808. Having moved to Wavertree, it reopened (although still only to subscribers) in 1836 and its site survives as a public park, a rather pale ghost of its former horticultural complexity.

Others sprang up. Belfast Botanic and Horticultural Society was formed in 1827, and in 1828 a 13-acre riverside site was acquired outside the town for a subscription-funded botanic garden and botanical museum. Royal Victoria Park, Bath, was an early public park, in which the Royal Victoria Horticultural and Botanical Garden was formed in 1839 and quickly acquired a noted collection of specimen trees and shrubs. The Yorkshire Philosophical Society laid out Museum Gardens, York, in 1844 as a private pleasure ground, forming a riverside setting for its Yorkshire Museum and the nearby ancient monuments that were incorporated. A small botanical garden had Order Beds in a geometrical layout. These examples survive as fine public gardens rather than true scientific botanic gardens.

Glasgow (1817) was founded by a learned society, the Royal Botanic Institution of Glasgow, but it was supported by Glasgow University. The garden was particularly important as the proving ground for another great botanist, William Hooker, who following in the footsteps of Joseph Banks, then moulded Kew into a scientific institution of worldwide renown. Early on, Glasgow benefited from the energetic and highly motivated Hooker, while he became one of the most eminent botanists in the world. The gardens flourished under his guidance, with rapidly expanding collections. From 1820 he occupied the Regius Chair of Botany until in 1841 he was appointed Director of Kew (then only 11 acres in embryo form).

Ornamental design and horticulture were essential as botanic gardens were usually also intended as attractive amenities. Important designers were sometimes employed. In 1829 local business and professional men formed the Birmingham Botanical and Horticultural Society to establish a botanical garden, with local residents as shareholders. An experienced local gardener, Mr Lunn, selected an 18-acre farm at the edge of Birmingham, with David Cameron, a contributor to The _Gardener's Magazine_ , as curator. John Claudius Loudon, the magazine's proprietor and a well-known garden designer, who had supplied Cameron with a reference, designed the garden. The brief was to combine a scientific with an ornamental garden and arboretum, including a nursery and market garden from which superfluous plants, fruits and culinary vegetables might be sold to offset the garden's expenses. Birmingham Botanical Gardens opened in 1832 as the first publicly owned botanic garden.

Rock gardens, such as at Birmingham, displayed the variety of alpine plants in a naturalistic setting.

At Sheffield (1836) Robert Marnock's design focused on the great glasshouse range, which, like many others, grew the giant tropical waterlily _Victoria amazonica_.

Another well-known designer laid out a botanic garden when Sheffield Botanical and Horticultural Society was formed in 1833. Robert Marnock won the competition and the gardens opened in 1836 to shareholders and annual subscribers. The focus was a range of three large and ornamental heated conservatories built in 1837–8. The central tropical Palm House was flanked by temperate houses. One housed a locally famous example of the huge waterlily _Victoria regia_ (now _V. amazonica_ ).

## COLONIAL BOTANIC GARDENS

FOR TWO CENTURIES from 1700 to 1900 colonial economics drove the founding of many botanic gardens in the tropics worldwide. These gardens were set up by European governments or trading companies such as the (British) East India Company (which behaved as a ruling power until 1858, when the colonial government of India took control) and the French and Dutch East India Companies. The gardens served enlarging empires, particularly of Britain, France, Spain and the Netherlands, searching for economic and medical crops for their colonies to grow to support the home country industrially and economically.

Scientific work continued, identifying and labelling live and preserved collections and exchanging seeds. Commercially and medically important plants were grown to test their suitability for new tropical climates. Botanic gardens acted as acclimatisation stations or _Jardins d'Acclimatation_ , such as the Jardin Gabrielle on the Île de France, a French West Indian possession. Crops included spices, tea, coffee, breadfruit, hemp, rubber, chocolate, cotton, and vanilla. Some crops when experimented with in new countries were a failure.

Cocoa ( _Theobroma cacao_ ) was an early tropical economic crop that botanic gardens helped to disseminate worldwide.

Britain set up the first tropical botanic garden in the western hemisphere in 1765 on the Caribbean island of St Vincent, funded with assistance from the Royal Society of Arts. Here the breadfruit was introduced from Tahiti by Captain William Bligh in 1793 as a potential food crop for slaves, but it seems they refused to eat it. Other botanic gardens followed on the major British West Indian islands, including Tobago, Trinidad, Grenada and Jamaica, founding a network that stretched to almost every British dependency and possession. Initially colonial botanic gardens were little more than collection stations for tropical plants in the manner of _Jardins d'Acclimatation_ , but in the nineteenth century some, such as Singapore (1859) and Peradeniya (Sri Lanka, 1821) developed into important research centres. Calcutta was an early tropical botanic garden, set up in 1787 by the ardent horticulturist Colonel Robert Kyd for the British East India Company to aid trading in the Far East. From the 1790s, managed by William Roxburgh and his successor Nathaniel Wallich, Calcutta became influential for the study of Indian plants and food crops, and as a staging post for plants sent from China to Europe. Teak, mahogany, sugar-cane and jute were introduced and tried here. In 1814 Roxburgh's _Hortus Bengalensis_ was published, a catalogue of the plants growing in the botanic garden.

The main colonial botanic gardens were generally near towns and cities. They had complex ornamental landscapes like public parks, while containing botanical plant collections and systematic display beds, and became valued public gardens. They were not linked officially to each other or to Kew, but were part of local colonial governments, with a strong degree of independence. Under both William and Joseph Hooker's guidance from 1841 to 1885 Kew developed a crucial role as the hub for the exchange of information, superintendents and gardeners (many Kew-trained), research findings and plant material, and also had a plant quarantine role.

In 1764 the first tropical botanic garden in the western hemisphere was set up by the British on St Vincent. It was one of a chain of colonial botanic gardens developed around the Caribbean.

Calcutta, India, was an early tropical botanic garden. It was founded in 1787 by the British East India Company to aid their trading in the Far East.

British-run botanic gardens were founded in Australia, New Zealand, Malaysia, Hong Kong, Singapore, Egypt, South Africa, Niger, Ceylon, India, the West Indies and elsewhere in the British Empire. Several were set up in each major country, some with satellite gardens. By 1890 there were thirty botanic gardens in India, ten in Australia and four in Africa. Major botanic gardens in India included Bombay, Calcutta and Madras. Ceylon's Peradeniya (1821), in the low hills above Colombo near Kandy, had satellites (or branch gardens) with varying climates, both at sea level (Henarathgoda), and in the cool temperate mountainous country (Hakgala). Hakgala (1861) was established to experiment with the Peruvian cinchona tree as the source of essential medical quinine, then tea cultivation, and was finally laid out ornamentally in the 1880s with sub-tropical and temperate plants.

The story of the dissemination of rubber plants via botanic gardens thousands of miles apart is a typical one of a tropical crop that became a key economic product. Henarathgoda was particularly significant as here in 1876 the first seedlings of the Brazilian Pará rubber tree ( _Hevea brasiliensis_ ) were planted in Asia, heralding the extensive colonial rubber industry in south-east Asia. The seed had been germinated at Kew from a large quantity smuggled out of Brazil, under the pretence that they were a gift for Queen Victoria. Although the plants flourished at Henarathgoda, it was in Singapore Botanic Garden around 1890 that ex-Kew man Henry Ridley, newly arrived as Director, devised a sustainable method of tapping the bark for the latex. This stimulated the first rubber planters of the Malay States to try rubber production, supported by Joseph Hooker back at Kew. Staff of the Dutch Bogor (Buitenzorg) botanic garden on Java collaborated with the British in methods of cultivation, although the commercial interests of the two colonial powers were in competition.

Other colonial countries founded networks of botanic gardens, closely connected with trade and economic crops. The Dutch set up their first in Cape Town around 1690. The South African Cape and the Dutch East Indies (now Indonesia) supplied Dutch botanic gardens, particularly Leiden and Amsterdam. The Dutch clandestinely obtained coffee plants in 1616 from Mocha in Yemen, which were propagated at Amsterdam Botanic Garden. These formed the basis of coffee plantations in the 1650s in their colony in Ceylon and later in India. The Dutch then moved to concentrate on plantations in their East India colonies in Java, Sumatra and Bali, which became the main suppliers to Europe. Bogor (originally called Buitenzorg) was set up in Java in 1817 by a Dutch botanist who was interested in plants used by the locals for domestic and medicinal purposes. The first curator, James Hooper, was a Kew-trained man. This garden played a key role in the commercial cultivation of medical quinine from cinchona.

Saharanpur, northern India. By the 1830s the extensive botanic garden combined the swirling lines of a public park with the more utilitarian grid (top) containing scientific Linnaean, medicinal and agricultural gardens.

The Royal Botanic Gardens, Sydney (1816), was the earliest Australian botanic garden. It retains a key role in Australian botany, with 20 per cent of its plant collection comprising native flora, and an extensive herbarium.

In the eighteenth century the most extensive botanic garden network was French colonial, including Caribbean Guadeloupe (1716). Pamplemousses (1735) in Mauritius in the Indian Ocean, initiated by the French East India Company, was developed by the traveller and botanist Pierre Poivre. These two originated as _Jardins d'Acclimatation_. Nantes, the French colonial equivalent of Kew, still flourishes. Madrid (1755) was the equivalent focus for the Spanish colonies, cultivating species from expeditions to the tropics, with an outpost on Tenerife: the Orotava Acclimatisation Garden (1788). The Jardin Colonial de Laeken near Brussels, Belgium, was set up in _c._ 1900 for propagating plants from the tropics for production and ornament, particularly to serve the Belgian Congo. The Jardim Colonial (1906, now the Jardim Botanico Tropical) had a similar role in Lisbon, Portugal.

Many American botanic gardens have renowned research facilities. At New York Botanical Garden the research hub is the grand 1890s library building, framed by the native Tulip Tree Allée.

## THE UNITED STATES OF AMERICA

UNITED STATES BOTANIC gardens adopted a similar form to contemporaries elsewhere, with Kew as a model for several, although without the colonial economic driver. They reflected the common interest in both native and exotic species and in providing places for research, public education and resort, with over eighty developed since 1800. Few botanic gardens developed in South America until the twentieth century, the greatest exception being at Rio de Janeiro, Brazil (1808).

In North America the first two botanic gardens were privately founded in the early eighteenth century on the east coast. The Quaker botanist and farmer John Bartram's Garden ( _c_. 1728) is near Philadelphia; he sent many plants to the nurseryman Peter Collinson in England. The first public botanic garden in the United States that survives (although moved to its present site in 1933) was the United States Botanic Garden in Washington DC (1820), near the United States Capitol. It embodied the desire of President George Washington, Thomas Jefferson and James Madison for a national botanic garden for the collection, preservation and study of plants worldwide to contribute to the welfare of the American people. In 1859 Missouri Botanical Garden was opened at St Louis and remains the nation's oldest botanic garden in continuous operation. Many others followed, including the Arnold Arboretum, Boston (1872), New York Botanical Garden (1891), Huntington Botanical Gardens, Los Angeles (1906), Brooklyn Botanic Garden, New York (1910), and Fairchild Tropical Botanic Garden, Miami (1938).

Washington DC (1820) was the first major botanic garden in the United States, moving to its present site in 1933.

Missouri Botanical Garden, regarded as the first modern botanic garden in the United States, was founded by an Englishman, Henry Shaw, in the 1850s at the gateway to the American West on the River Mississippi. One of the major early American botanists, George Engelmann, advised Shaw, and, with the Harvard University botanist Asa Gray and Kew's Sir William Hooker, persuaded him to include a scientific aspect, including a herbarium and library. Founded on broad lines as both a beautiful display garden and a place for learning and the advancement of botanical science, it became one of the world's leading gardens specialising in tropical plants, a great centre for taxonomy, and is one of the most visited gardens in the United States.

The Arnold Arboretum (founded 1872 and named in honour of a major donor, James Arnold) was designed to display hardy woody plants. Its Picturesque layout was by the most important American landscape architect of his day, Frederick Law Olmsted (designer of Central Park, New York), and remains one of the best preserved of his landscapes. It was founded as a public–private partnership between the City of Boston and Harvard University, 'for the establishment and support of an arboretum... which shall contain, as far as practicable, all the trees [and] shrubs ... either indigenous or exotic, which can be raised in the open air'. The 280-acre collection became one of the most comprehensive and best documented of its kind, part of a respected research institution with a herbarium collection of over 1.3 million specimens, and a library of forty thousand volumes. The Arboretum's first director was the botanist Charles Sprague Sargent (1841–1927), who had learned much from Asa Gray. From 1873 Sargent spent fifty-four years shaping it into a distinguished garden and institution, influential worldwide, with an emphasis on the woody species of North America and eastern Asia. He arranged the plant collections by family and genus so that 'a visitor driving through the Arboretum will be able to obtain a general idea of the arborescent vegetation of the north temperate zone without even leaving his carriage.... Such an arrangement, while avoiding the stiff and formal lines of the conventional botanic garden, will facilitate the comprehensive study of the collections, both in their scientific and picturesque aspects.' Great collections came from eastern Asia via intrepid plant-hunters, including Sargent himself, Ernest Henry Wilson, William Purdom and Joseph Rock. They introduced many common garden plants, as part of a long and noble tradition of botanical plant-hunters that continues today.

An early display of botanical classification in cacti, Missouri Botanical Garden, St Louis. The nation's oldest botanic garden in continuous operation was opened in 1859 by the wealthy businessman Henry Shaw.

Cordial international relations have always been important between botanic gardens. Kew's Joseph Hooker (seated far left) on a botanical collecting trip in 1877 to the US Rockies, with his friend the great American botanist Asa Gray (on ground) of Harvard, and Mrs Gray.

The scientific focus of another great show garden, New York Botanical Garden, was on plants of the western hemisphere and particularly the Americas. Its founders were Nathaniel Lord Britton, Columbia University Professor of Botany and Geology, and his wife Elizabeth, who in 1888 travelled to London, visited Kew and admired its purpose and set-up. Their New York foundation in 1891 followed the Kew model, and developed major research collections in its library and herbarium. It was designed by two of the most distinguished American designers, the architect Calvert Vaux and Olmsted, and completed in the 1920s. The 90 acres of varied landscaped displays in the 220-acre site represent plants worldwide, alongside a vibrant research and scientific programme, sending out collecting expeditions and publishing research results.

Understanding and conserving native flora and habitats is a key role of modern botanic gardens. The Native Plant Garden, New York Botanical Garden.

Children have been growing flowers, vegetables and herbs and learning firsthand about the natural world in Brooklyn Botanic Garden's Children's Garden since 1914.

Some botanic gardens concentrate on garden cultivars rather than species. Longwood Gardens, Pennsylvania, is renowned for extravagant and educational horticultural displays.

The National Botanic Garden of Wales (2000), has a central conservation role. Sir Norman Foster's glasshouse grows rare and endangered Mediterranean-climate plants from around the world, including Chile, California, South Africa, Australia and the Canaries.

## THE TWENTIETH CENTURY: EDUCATION AND CONSERVATION

BY THE EARLY twentieth century the United Kingdom had twenty-two botanic gardens, including three government-funded national institutions, at Kew, Edinburgh and Dublin (now in the Republic of Ireland). Kew remained the greatest of these although Edinburgh too had a fine scientific institution and beautiful garden, a tradition of worldwide collecting, and strong connections with colonial botanic gardens. A renaissance in science in botanic gardens occurred, and crop experimentation declined. The focus shifted away from developing agricultural, horticultural and timber crops towards the classification and cultivation of wild plant species, for which utilitarian research stations were set up. Plant conservation, via specialist cultivation and propagation techniques for threatened flora, and public education became important aspects. Today there are around thirty British botanic gardens.

New British botanic gardens included Wisley, Surrey (1904), for the Royal Horticultural Society (RHS), and after the Second World War for universities including Leeds (1946), Southampton (1950), Durham (1971) and Reading (1972). Some specialised in certain types of plants. The 290-acre Bedgebury National Pinetum, Kent (1920s), was founded to grow conifers in conditions in which they would thrive. It now has over twelve thousand trees and shrubs (including 1,800 different species) from five continents, many being rare and endangered. At Ventnor, in a balmy coastal site on the Isle of Wight, the local authority established in 1971 a garden where exotic semi-tender plants could be grown outdoors as a botanical display collection. The most recent foundations are the National Botanic Garden of Wales in rural Carmarthenshire (2000) with its glasshouse by Sir Norman Foster and eight thousand different plant varieties, spread across 560 rural acres, and the Eden Project, Cornwall, dominated by its biomes set in a former china-clay pit (opened 2001).

Wisley, Surrey, followed a different direction, specialising in cultivated varieties of garden plants, and is the greatest British botanic garden founded in the twentieth century. In 1904 Wisley became the Royal Horticultural Society's research centre and replacement ornamental garden when the society left its Chiswick site and moved to a 53-acre estate, growing to its present 240 acres, with an extensive seed bank and herbarium of 100,000 specimens. Wisley is unique in British botanic gardens in hosting extensive growing trials to monitor performance and identify the garden value of both ornamentals and productive varieties and cultivars. Its parallel in the USA is Longwood, Pennsylvania.

The trial grounds at RHS Wisley assess the suitability of garden cultivars – in this case, delphiniums.

Temperate conifers worldwide are the speciality of the Bedgebury National Pinetum, Kent, set up in the 1920s.

Satellite gardens offer different conditions to grow types of plants not suited to the main garden, and were acquired by several British botanic gardens. To supplement the limited range and number of plant types that Oxford Botanic Garden could accommodate in the city, a new woody plant collection, the Harcourt Arboretum, was set up in 1963, in a Victorian pinetum in rural Nuneham Courtenay, several miles south of Oxford. In 1965 Kew acquired Wakehurst Place, West Sussex. As well as a fine woody plant collection from East Asia and the southern continents, it had a less polluted atmosphere, fertile acid soil and moist sheltered valleys of the High Weald, creating conditions suited to growing Far Eastern subjects from the moist temperate Himalayas. Here the extensive Millennium Seed Bank was opened in 2000, its conservation aim being to save plants worldwide, with a focus on plants most at risk and most useful for the future. This is one of many botanic-garden seed banks set up to preserve rare and threatened plant species.

Edinburgh's three satellite gardens again extended the range of growing conditions of the mother garden – in this case set in a cold, exposed northern east-coast city. It acquired Younger Botanic Garden at Benmore near Dunoon, Logan near Stranraer, and Dawyk in the Scottish Borders. Younger (1929) was an established garden on the mild and moist west coast, its climate benefiting from the Gulf Stream, ideal for growing rhododendrons and conifers raised in Edinburgh. Logan (1969) is close to Scotland's most southern point. It, too, benefits from the warmth of the Gulf Stream and acid soil, ideal for collections from the southern hemisphere – southern South America, southern Africa and Australasia, especially those needing greenhouse protection elsewhere. Dawyk (1978), by contrast, has a cold and dry, continental climate, good for woody plants from areas with harsher climates, not suited to Edinburgh.

Satellite gardens have an important role, as at Logan, a considerably warmer satellite of the Royal Botanic Garden Edinburgh, has a balmy climate that suits plants from the southern hemisphere and those that need greenhouse protection elsewhere.

The Wollemi pine ( _Wollemia nobilis_ ) has a great botanic-garden conservation story. It was known only through fossils until a hundred were discovered in remotest Australia in 1994. Propagated here at Mount Annan Botanic Garden, Australia (1988), and distributed worldwide, its future seems assured.

Outside Europe many new botanic gardens were set up in the twentieth century, with conservation as a key aim. 150 were formed in the former USSR across the climate zones, including Moscow, Minsk, Yalta and Kiev. Canada developed a group including Montreal (1929); new ones in the United States included Fairchild, Florida, and there were many in South American countries. In South Africa Kirstenbosch (1913) pioneered the study of its own particular geographical flora, rather than the introduction of economic plants or the general study of botany, becoming a renowned centre for indigenous Cape flora. China's many botanic gardens include Kunming (1938), Beijing and Wuhan (both 1956); the Arab world has also developed a number.

Indigenous flora is an important subject. South Africa's Kirstenbosch (1913) is a renowned centre for indigenous Cape flora, famed for its beauty and dramatic setting below Table Mountain.

Westonbirt Arboretum, developed since the 1850s, now has 2,500 types of tree. It is renowned for its autumn colour and, for added attraction to winter visitors, the trees are vividly illuminated.

## WHAT MAKES A BOTANIC GARDEN?

THE COMBINED CULTIVATION and curation of living plant specimens, and the collection and curation of preserved specimens, are key to the work of a botanic garden. Together the living and preserved specimens form an essential reference collection for scientific study set within an ornamental garden usually containing various buildings to support this work.

### THE LIVING PLANT COLLECTION: THE GARDEN AND ITS LAYOUT

The garden layout often reflects landscape fashions when it was formed, perhaps redesigned if it has a long history, such as Oxford, or incorporating new features. A wide range of plants is grown outdoors, including trees in landscaped arboreta, and in glasshouses with a range of climates, for ornamental and scientific display. An understanding of the identity and provenance of live plants is essential. Most plants are labelled with their Latin names and a unique reference number to aid curation of the collection. Horticultural standards are usually high, propagating, testing and displaying new and rare species and varieties. Many botanic gardens now specialise in cultivating a particular regional flora or families of plants. Some arrange plants geobotanically, so that each section represents the flora of a particular region. Areas may be set aside for certain plant types, and from particular conditions and climates, such as alpines and rock plants, succulents, bulbs and marginal and water plants. Greenhouses usually include a display of economic plants, which can be studied alongside the products in the museum. Plants are often exchanged through published seed lists.

Systematic, Family or Order Beds at Padua. These are a hallmark of a botanic garden, displaying flowering plants by families in order of their relationships with each other.

Order Beds (also called Systematic or Family Beds) are unique to botanic gardens, the descendants of the teaching beds in the earliest Italian physic gardens. Many botanic gardens still display plants in this way. The Order Beds contain flowering plants (Angiosperms) arranged systematically according to their relationships with each other, grouped in their botanical families from the most primitive to the most advanced. Order Beds such as at Oxford and Kew were laid out in a formal grid pattern of narrow beds; at Oxford this allowed the renowned Professor Daubeny to lecture from the top to the students standing along the sides, echoing teaching practice in Renaissance Padua. Their planting reflected the Victorian system devised by British botanists George Bentham and Joseph Hooker, itself influenced by Darwin's ideas on evolution. The plant families were split into two major groups, the Dicotyledons (Dicots) and the Monocotyledons (Monocots), allocated according to flower structure and set out in order of the perceived level of advancement and complexity. Cambridge, however, chose another botanical system and a less formal pattern of beds in which to display plants. Its systematic beds were designed in 1846, based on an influential botanical text by de Candolle (1819), to house eighty-four families of hardy herbaceous plants. The beds had a central section of Monocots. Radiating from this, hedges defined spaces for the four groups into which Dicots were thought to fall. Beds were laid out to represent the pages of the book so that a visitor could complete a circuit moving from the first page to the last.

Established plant classification systems based on flower structure have recently been overtaken by revelations from studying plant DNA. Ongoing work by the Angiosperm Phylogeny Group (APG) has re-grouped plants more accurately according to their ancestry, using DNA sequencing to identify relationships. Some gardens, such as Kew and Oxford, are rearranging plants in their Order Beds based on this APG classification. At Kew, ninety-three plant families will be displayed in 102 beds.

The Order Beds at Kew are arranged in order of family relationships from least to most botanically advanced.

### THE PRESERVED PLANT COLLECTION: THE HERBARIUM

A herbarium houses reference collections of preserved plant specimens grown in the botanic garden or collected from the wild, for botanical study. It complements the living collection. The larger botanic gardens have separate buildings for these collections, often quite grand; smaller ones have perhaps only a room or small building for this purpose, or are connected to a university botany department collection. As with the living collection, curation is important to ensure a full knowledge of identity and provenance. Specimens are usually dried, pressed, mounted and labelled on loose sheets of paper which, when properly stored and handled, can last almost indefinitely and can be added to and rearranged. Each sheet has its own label with essential curation information on it. Unwieldy specimens such as large fleshy fruits or fragile flowers such as orchids are pickled in jars; large fruits are stored in boxes.

Nearly two thousand species of plant a year are described as new. Naming a new species involves deciding it has never been described before, then writing a description that distinguishes it from others in the genus, and giving it a new Latin name. Lastly, a typical specimen – the Type Specimen – is selected as the key specimen on which the original species description is based. By inspecting a type specimen future taxonomists can be certain of the identity of the new species. Instead of accepting the original author's description (which may be centuries old), they can check the specimen physically for themselves. Being unique, type specimens are all the more precious.

Herbarium specimens are crucial to the work of a botanic garden. This 'type' herbarium specimen of tropical carnivorous pitcher plant ( _Nepenthes ampullaria_ ) is used to verify all other specimens. This data is supplemented by botanical art to indicate the living form, here by an Indian artist of the East India Company School.

An early herbarium sheet, collected by Johann Dillenius, first Sherard Professor of Botany at Oxford, by 1741. The lichen specimens are oddly framed by wallpaper.

The first herbarium as a collection of preserved plants was created by the Renaissance botanist Luca Ghini in Italy. This tool quickly became an essential element of naming and identification alongside the living collection of a botanic garden and its library. The botanist William Roxburgh, as superintendent of Calcutta Botanic Garden from 1793, acquired plants from all over India. Using these, he developed an extensive herbarium, which formed the basis of the Central National Herbarium of the Botanical Survey of India, now comprising some 2.5 million items.

The origin of the largest herbarium was William Hooker's own specimens at Kew. This collection developed in serious rivalry (and even open warfare) with the British Museum, which had hitherto acquired all the main herbaria connected with Kew collectors, including Joseph Banks's peerless collection. The first purpose-built wing at Kew was erected in 1877 and two more followed in similar, if less elaborate, form in 1902 and 1932. In each 'herbarium hall' one or more floors of galleries surrounded a central well (rather like a Victorian prison), each gallery housing ranks of wooden cupboards for the specimens. Internal structural piers and panelled balustrade were sometimes of elaborate wrought iron, with spiral staircases to allow ease of access to all floors, polished timber floors and mahogany handrails. Other British colonial herbarium buildings adopted this distinctive form, including Calcutta and Peradeniya. Preservation of specimens was always a problem, especially in the tropics, and mothballs in the storage cupboards were used as a prophylactic against insect damage.

The herbarium building was the focus of botanical data. At Kew galleries with herbarium cupboards surround a central well. Some colonial botanic gardens used this model, for example Calcutta and Peradeniya.

Today the Kew herbarium houses seven million specimens including 250,000 types, 200,000 specimens of cultivated plants and 80,000 artefacts of plant and fungal origin. Although Kew has the most extensive herbarium, Edinburgh's is older, with over 2 million specimens, some dating back to 1697, from all over the world. Others also have extensive collections with over a million specimens, such as New York, Missouri, Calcutta and Sydney.

Other structures are needed to run a botanic garden successfully, particularly glasshouses for display and to propagate and cultivate collections that are not displayed, a reference library and, an optional extra, a museum of plant-related items such as economic botany products.

Smaller botanic gardens carried out similar scientific activities. Trinidad's modest herbarium and library, with dried specimens on sheets kept in cupboards, fleshy specimens in pickle jars and a plant press.

### GLASSHOUSES

Glasshouses are needed to propagate, grow and display the plants. As well as display houses, a botanic garden will have an area of service glasshouses behind the scenes that the public do not see, in order to house the rest of the collection and for propagation purposes. These are more workaday and efficient in housing large numbers of plants, and may include a micro-propagation unit for rapid propagation of large numbers of offspring cloned from a small amount of tissue taken from a single parent plant.

Early glasshouses growing tender exotics were not very successful. The heating was primitive and light levels low. Oxford Botanic Garden's early glasshouses on a south-facing wall.

Kew's ambitious cast-iron Palm House being built in the 1840s. With its iconic shape, it became the best-known glasshouse in the world.

Small glasshouses in early botanic gardens cultivated and displayed precious tender plants. Oxford and Chelsea boasted early examples against south-facing walls before 1700, but the restricted use of glass, and unreliable and localised heating, provided poor growing conditions with insufficient light.

Palatial display glasshouses were inspired in many large private and public gardens after major industrial innovation in the early nineteenth century. This encouraged the collection of tropical species such as orchids and ferns, with the associated Victorian mania for acquisition. The new technology combined two key materials: iron (both for structure and heating systems) and glass, which could be used on a much larger scale, providing closer to ideal growing conditions for plants. Botanic gardens embraced these pioneering developments for display and cultivation, devising different types of glasshouses to emulate various climates. The Victorian botanic garden became the mecca for spectacular glass palaces of plants.

Far ahead of his time were J. C. Loudon's innovative glasshouse designs in his layout for Birmingham Botanical Gardens in 1831. He designed two large glass domes for growing plants, detailing steam heating, ventilation and rain-making apparatus and divisions into various climates. Though both beautiful and practical, these far-sighted ideas were too expensive and remained on paper. Rohault's 1830s glasshouses in the Jardin des Plantes, Paris, were perhaps the first large structures consisting mainly of iron and glass, influencing other European architects and botanic gardens, particularly at Liège and Ghent, which are near copies.

The curvilinear cast-iron Belfast Palm House (1839, Charles Lanyon), manufactured by Richard Turner of Dublin, heralded Turner and Burton's Kew Palm House.

The most famous of these botanic glass cathedrals is the Palm House at Kew (1845–8). It epitomises the close relationship required between the architect (Decimus Burton) and the engineer, whose design and fabricating skills were essential – in this case Richard Turner, of the Hammersmith Works, Dublin. This vast tropical glasshouse was built early in the days of iconic glasshouses and remains one the finest glass and iron conservatories built in Britain.

The Temperate Palm House, Edinburgh (1858), remains the tallest in Britain, combining masonry and curvilinear ironwork.

Some botanic gardens saw momentous events. The two greatest British Victorian politicians were installed in the Kibble Palace as Rectors of Glasgow University: Benjamin Disraeli on 19 November 1873, just after it opened, and William Ewart Gladstone in 1879.

Turner pioneered his engineering skills shortly before working at Kew, erecting two beautiful curvilinear glasshouse ranges in Irish botanic gardens: the Belfast Palm House (1839, designed by Charles Lanyon), and at Dublin in 1842–3, both still in use. These all inspired large iron and glass buildings beyond gardens as exhibition buildings, the greatest being Joseph Paxton's Crystal Palace for the Great Exhibition (1851), and splendid station sheds such as George Gilbert Scott's St Pancras (1866) in London.

Kew then acquired what remains one of the largest glasshouse groups in the world: Burton's Temperate House (1861–2; extended 1890s), which is 628 feet long, covering 1.5 acres. It was more sophisticated than the Palm House, which provided only a single vast climate zone, instead having five pavilions for different climates. However, its masonry exterior, though more architecturally stylish, made it less attractive than the soaring elegance of the cast-iron Palm House.

Great display glasshouses continued to be built. In 1902, when the magnificent Conservatory and Palm Court opened at New York, it was a sensation. Its eleven houses covered over an acre.

The tradition of iconic glasshouses continued with Missouri Botanical Garden's Climatron (1959). It is still redolent of the Space Age. The geodesic dome (21 metres high, 53 metres diameter) covers half an acre, built of 3,625 triangular panes of glass in a framework of aluminium tubing.

Later in the line of magnificent glasshouses, Glasgow's Kibble Palace rivals the Kew Palm House in its quality of design. Brought from its owner entrepreneur John Kibble's home by barge to Glasgow Botanic Gardens, it was reconstructed with a vast new circular dome 45 metres across, and an impressive frontage. The new glass palace opened in 1873, and was lit by six hundred gas lamps, which could be coloured for effect. The outstanding tree-fern collection planted in the 1880s today forms a National Collection.

European botanic gardens had fine glasshouses including a cast-iron curvilinear Gothic conservatory in Florence, Berlin's Mediterranean House, and a Palm House in Helsinki. In the United States impressive botanic garden glasshouses appeared late in the century. The outstanding Enid A. Haupt Conservatory and Palm Court, New York (1897–1902), was inspired by the glasshouses at Kew, and financed by major patrons, including J. P. Morgan, Cornelius Vanderbilt II and Andrew Carnegie. A glass, iron and steel structure, its eleven houses cover an acre. A startling new design of glass palace developed the botanic-garden tradition at Missouri in 1959. The iconic Climatron heralded a new age in glasshouse building. The first geodesic dome used for a botanical structure, the design was guided by climate control, in two zones for mountainous and tropical flora, without the need for internal structural piers.

### LIBRARIES

'A botanical library is useful without a herbarium, but not a herbarium without the library.' So said botanist George Bentham in 1858. In a botanic garden the library is essential for researchers and gardeners to identify and understand the plants sent as dried specimens as well as live plants, and to spread research carried out in other institutions. Here a library houses botanical periodicals that reflect continuing research. The most famous and longest running of these is _Curtis's Botanical Magazine_ , a finely illustrated journal describing plant species founded in 1787 by William Curtis. Still produced at Kew, it remains the supreme serial of botanical illustration. The consistent quality of plates and scholarly authority make it the most widely cited work of its kind. A botanic-garden library also contains monographs devoted to individual genera, and floras describing the plants found in particular geographical areas of the world, often researched and written by botanists based in botanic gardens, such as Roxburgh's _Flora Indica_ (1820/4). It will probably also contain the archive of the institution since its foundation.

Many botanic gardens have extensive collections of fine botanical illustrations. _Jatropha gossypifolia_ , once used to treat leprosy, by an Indian 'Company School' artist (1840s), now at Edinburgh.

### BOTANICAL ART

Accurate artistic representations are important alternatives to live or preserved specimens where these are not available, recording a plant species or plant part. As a painted herbarium, they supplement the dried specimens, for example depicting different stages of a plant not seen in a single specimen or the form of a whole plant where this is too large to preserve complete. From the earliest days botanic gardens acquired and commissioned collections of often exquisite botanical illustrations for this purpose, and illustrations continue to be commissioned today, both in the field and from material in the garden.

Botanical illustration developed (like the botanic garden) both as an art form and with a scientific purpose from the days of the first illustrated herbals and reached its peak of sophistication between 1750 and 1850. Improvements in printing allowed illustrations to be seen by, and educate, a wide audience. Eighteenth-century artists included George Ehret, sometime 'painter at the [Chelsea] Physick Garden' in the mid-century. Slightly later, Francis Masson's patrons included Joseph Banks, who underwrote his expedition to South Africa. Many exceptional botanic-garden artists contributed to _Curtis's Botanical Magazine_ from 1787. William and Joseph Hooker themselves produced outstanding botanical illustrations at Kew, Joseph's triumph being those of his Himalayan plants, particularly of flamboyant rhododendrons.

Marianne North, the most famous of Victorian lady travellers and flower painters. She travelled the tropics, intrepidly painting plants in their luscious native habitat.

Botanical artists endured many difficulties to paint plants _in situ_. Thomas Baines in South Africa (1861) painting a _Welwitschia_ , which obtains its water from the fogs of the inhospitable Namib desert.

Skilful Indian artists were essential to illustrate plants for the East India Company. Company botanists (such as Roxburgh at Calcutta), known collectively as the Company School, employed these artists to record the largely unknown flora, at a time when keeping dried specimens was very difficult in the hot moist Indian climate with voracious insects and fungi. Teams worked at the East India Company gardens at Calcutta and Saharanpur, but individual artists are elusive as few names are recorded. One of the most skilful and prolific was Vishnupersaud, whose work had exceptional depth and perspective as well as artistic elegance. This tradition of fine and detailed illustrations, probably derived from the schools of painters trained in the Moghul miniature tradition, continued into the later nineteenth century. Edinburgh and Kew have extensive collections.

Coloured models could be extremely lifelike, supplementing information from preserved specimens by showing the plant form. This fine wax peach branch was sculpted in the late nineteenth century.

Not only plants but also fungi were recorded artistically for botanic gardens, including fungi. A watercolour by botanical artist Mary E. Eaton, _c._ 1930, at New York.

Genteel European ladies excelled in this art form. One fine botanical painter in particular, Marianne North, epitomised the intrepid Victorian lady traveller. Unusually, she painted in oils and recorded subjects in their florid natural setting rather than in isolation against a plain background. Her subjects were mainly tropical, including examples from India, Brazil, Borneo, Australia and the Seychelles. She presented her vast output to Kew and paid for a gallery crammed full of 833 brightly coloured paintings, opened in 1882.

### MUSEUMS

From around 1800 the growth in museums embodied a key part of a public appetite for knowledge. This was also reflected in botanic gardens, which were essentially curated collections of plants like a living museum. Several early regional botanic gardens had their own museums of plant-related objects. In the 1820s Belfast had a botanical museum, and others had museums, both for teaching students and for display to the general public. At Kew William Hooker took a different, pioneering theme and set up a museum of economic botany, the first of its kind and an influential idea on later botanic gardens worldwide. It was based on textiles, drugs, gums, dyes and timbers, all of which were of potential value to botanists, manufacturers and merchants, and displayed in glazed mahogany cabinets. The first museum opened here in 1848 in an adapted fruit store, and was re-housed in a purpose-built museum by Decimus Burton in 1857 across the lake opposite the Palm House. Missouri and New York botanic gardens set up museums following this model in the United States.

Museums were built as teaching aids. The first Museum of Economic Botany was at Kew (1847), displaying the myriad uses of plants worldwide.

The museum at Missouri Botanical Garden was modelled on Kew by Henry Shaw to house his library collection and herbarium. When he died aged eighty-nine in 1889, he lay there in state.

## PLACES TO VISIT

Many botanic gardens also have Friends' Groups to join. The dates of founding or opening are given in brackets.

### BRITAIN AND IRELAND

_Bedgebury National Pinetum, Kent_ (1925), Park Lane, Cranbrook TN17 2SL. Telephone: 01580 879820. Website: www.forestry.gov.uk/forestry/infd-8ycjzs

_Belfast Botanic Garden_ (1828), College Park, Botanic Avenue, Belfast BT7 1LP. Telephone: 028 9031 4762. Website: www.fobbg.co.uk

_Birmingham Botanical Gardens_ (1832), Westbourne Road, Edgbaston, Birmingham B15 3TR. Telephone: 0121 454 1860. Website: www.birminghambotanicalgardens.org.uk

_Cambridge University Botanic Garden_ (1762), 1 Brookside, Cambridge, CB2 1JE. Telephone: 01223 336265. Website: www.botanic.cam.ac.uk

_Chelsea Physic Garden_ (1673), 66 Royal Hospital Road, Chelsea, London SW3 4HS. Telephone: 020 7352 5646. Website: www.chelseaphysicgarden.co.uk

_Dawyck Botanic Garden_ (1978), Stobo, near Peebles, Scottish Borders EH45 9JU. Telephone: 01721 760 254. Website: www.rbge.org.uk/the-gardens/dawyck

_Eden Project_ (2001), Bodelva, Cornwall PL24 2SG. Telephone: 01726 811911. Website: www.edenproject.com

_Glasgow Botanic Gardens_ (1842), 730 Great Western Road, Glasgow G12 OUE. Telephone: 0141 276 1614. Website: www.glasgowbotanicgardens.com

_Logan Botanic Garden_ (1969), Port Logan, Stranraer, Dumfries & Galloway DG9 9ND. Telephone: 01776 860231. Website: www.rbge.org.uk/the-gardens/logan

_National Botanic Garden of Wales_ (2000), Llanarthne, Carmarthenshire SA32 8HN. Telephone: 01558 667149. Website: www.gardenofwales.org.uk

_Ness Botanic Gardens_ (1898), University of Liverpool, Neston Road, Ness, Cheshire CH64 4AY. Telephone: 0845 0304063. Website: www.nessgardens.org.uk

_Oxford University Botanic Garden_ (1621), Rose Lane, Oxford OX1 4AZ. Telephone: 01865 286690. Website: www.botanic-garden.ox.ac.uk

_Royal Botanic Garden, Edinburgh_ (1670), 20A Inverleith Row, Edinburgh EH3 5LR. Telephone: 0131 552 7171. Website: www.rbge.org.uk

_Royal Botanic Gardens_ (1759, a UNESCO World Heritage Site), Kew, Richmond, Surrey TW9 3AB. Telephone: 020 8332 5655. Website: www.kew.org

_Royal Horticultural Society's Gardens_ (1904), Wisley, Woking, Surrey GU23 6QB. Telephone: 0845 260 9000. Website: www.rhs.org.uk/gardens/wisley

_Ventnor Botanic Garden_ (1972), Undercliff Drive, Ventnor, Isle of Wight PO38 1UL. Telephone: 01983 855397. Website: www.botanic.co.uk

_Westonbirt Arboretum_ (1850s), Tetbury, Gloucestershire GL8 8QS. Telephone: 01666 880220. Website: www.forestry.gov.uk/westonbirt

_Younger Botanic Garden_ (1929), Benmore, Dunoon, Argyll PA23 8QU. Telephone: 01369 706261. Website: www.rbge.org.uk/the-gardens/benmore

## FURTHER READING

Many botanic gardens publish their own guidebooks and histories and have further information on their websites. The following titles provide a broader context for these and some include current information on botanic gardens.

### BOOKS

Bown, D. _Four Gardens in One: The Royal Botanic Garden Edinburgh_. HMSO, 1992.

Desmond, R. The _History of the Royal Botanic Gardens Kew_. Harvill and Royal Botanic Gardens, Kew, second edition, 2007.

Hyams, E., and MacQuitty, W. _Great Botanical Gardens of the World_. Nelson, 1969.

Johnson, B., et al. _Botanic Gardens: A Living History_. Black Dog, 2007.

Long, G. The _New York Botanical Garden_. Harry N. Abrams, 2006.

Oldfield, S. _Botanic Gardens: Modern Day Arks_. Botanic Gardens Conservation International, 2010.

Oldfield, S. _Great Botanic Gardens of the World_. Botanic Gardens Conservation International, 2007.

Rix, M. The _Golden Age of Botanical Art_. Andre Deutsch and Royal Botanic Gardens, Kew, 2012.

Young, M. _Guide to the Botanical Gardens of Britain_. Collins, 1987.

### WEBSITE

Botanic Gardens Conservation International is a plant conservation charity that promotes the work of botanic gardens in the conservation of plants and their habitats, and public education. Its website has entries for over 3,000 botanic gardens and plant collections.

WWW.BGCI.ORG

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COVER IMAGE

Cover design and photography by Peter Ashley. Birmingham Botanical Gardens, Bird-of-Paradise flower ( _Strelitzia reginae_ ).

ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

I would particularly like to thank Sara Oldfield, Secretary General, Botanic Gardens Conservation International for advice, and Julia Buckley of the Royal Botanic Gardens, Kew Library who has been of particular help in the selection and provision of many images. I also thank Henry Noltie, Royal Botanic Gardens, Edinburgh; Tim Knox, Fitzwilliam Museum, Cambridge, Stephen Harris, Oxford University Department of Plant Sciences and Sylvia Behr. Specific illustrations are acknowledged as follows:

Alice Notton, Kirstenbosch National Botanical Garden, page 43; Bedgebury National Pinetum, page 41; Bibliotheque interuniversitaire de Montpellier, page 13; Birmingham Botanical Gardens, page 25; Brooklyn Botanic Garden, page 37 (centre); Economic Botany Collection, Royal Botanic Gardens, Kew, page 59 (left); © The Fitzwilliam Museum, Cambridge, contents page; The Garden Museum, pages  (bottom),  (top); Margaret Morgan, page 42 (bottom); Meg Jullien, page 26; Logan Botanic Garden, page 42 (top); ©Andrew McRobb, Royal Botanic Gardens, Kew, page 47; Missouri Botanical Garden Archives, pages ,  (bottom); National Botanic Garden of Wales, page 38; New York Botanical Garden, pages ,  (top),  (bottom),  (right); Oxford University, page 49; Royal Botanic Garden, Edinburgh, page 56; © Royal Botanic Gardens, Kew, title page and pages ,  (top), , , , , , , , ,  (top), , ,  (top); www.skyscene.co.uk, page 8; Steve Savery, page 44; Wellcome Library, London, pages  (both), , , , , , , , ,  (bottom); Shutterstock, pages , ,  (bottom),  (top); www.KarlGercens.com, page 40.

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