The Top 10 ‘first’ botanic gardens (Plant Portrait XVIII*)
Roger Spencer and Rob Cross, in a recent article in the scientific journal Muelleria, document the origins of botanic gardens (and more). They confirm that the ‘oldest existing [my
emphasis] botanic gardens date back to the early modern period, to the
educational physic gardens associated with the medical faculties of
universities in 16th-century Renaissance Italy’. This is generally
accepted, although there is some debate – alluded to in Spencer and Cross’s
article – around the ‘first botanic garden’. Some of this is a minor quibble
about continuity: the first botanic garden built in Italy was in Pisa, in 1544,
but in 1591 the entire garden was moved a few blocks away from the river, making
the botanic garden of Padua (apparently early in 1545; closely followed by Florence
in December 1545) the oldest botanic gardens continuing in the same location.
More interesting but ultimately unresolvable (except through
precision of definition) is whether there were botanic gardens, or things like
them, in antiquity. The closest match, as Spencer and Cross document, is the 4th-century
BCE garden at the Lyceum in Athens. It certainly contained a collection of
plants used at least in part for scientific observation. To my knowledge the
plants were not labelled in any way, a characteristic inevitably included as any
definition of a botanic garden, and the landscape and horticulture were probably
not particularly ‘ornamental’. Spence and Cross quite rightly argue that
contemporary botanic gardens generally include ornamental horticulture as part
of their ‘mix of science and education, art and utility’. There are further
nuances in this debate. The botanic garden in Leiden (1587) may have been the first
garden with ornamental and scientific values, and not just growing plants for
their medicinal use. And if medicinal gardens are allowed into the club, there
were some established outside of Europe in the 16th-century, such as
the one established by the Portuguese in Goa (now India).
In the next century, the University of Oxford Botanic Gardens
(1621) and the Chelsea Physic Garden (1673) were established, well before Royal
Botanic Gardens Kew in London (1759). Somewhere in between, in 1718, Jardin de
Plantes in Paris changed its emphasis, and name, from medicinal plants to plants
more generally. In the US, The Missouri Botanical Garden in St Louis,
established in 1859, describes itself as ‘the nation’s oldest botanical garden
in continuous operation’. So too does the U.S. Botanic Garden, in Washington
DC, which opened in 1850: ‘the oldest continuously operated botanical garden’. And
I‘ve seen Bartam’s Garden in Philadelphia, which started in 1728, called ‘the
oldest surviving botanic garden in North America’.
What about in the Southern Hemisphere? I’ve often said, for
reasons I can longer remember, that the Jardim Botânico do Rio de Janeiro in
Brazil, established in 1808, is the oldest south of the equator, followed by
Sydney in Australia (1816) and Bogor in Indonesia (1817). I may have been a
little parochial, having visited all three and being Director of the middle one
for a while. In any case, Spencer and Cross designate the Sir Seewoosagur
Ramgoolam Botanical Garden in Mauritius, established in 1736, or more formally
as a botanic garden in 1767. Then there is the Company Garden in Cape Town,
begun in 1652 and already, according to Spencer and Cross, ‘an exceptional
botanic garden’ by 1680. I visited the Company Garden in 2005, and while now
outside the botanic garden network in South Africa, it could still be technically
considered a botanic garden.
It’s a complicated business tracking down when a garden
begins and even harder, perhaps, to determine when it begins to be a botanic
garden. All botanic gardens will be a little less ‘botanic’ in their early
years even if established as such right from the start. The mobility of some makes
it even more difficult to nail down when and where they start to function as a
botanic garden. Then there is the fundamental question of what makes a garden
botanic. There are have many attempts, with these four (including one of my
own) representing a progression over the last 50 or so years:
1.
‘...open to the public and in which the plants
are labelled’ (International Association of Botanic Gardens 1963)
2.
‘A garden
with (noting that this list does not
constitute a comprehensive summary of the activities undertaken by botanic
gardens):
•
adequate labelling of the plants
•
an underlying scientific basis for the
collections
•
communication of information to other
gardens, institutions, organisations and the public
•
exchange of seeds or other materials with
other botanic gardens, arboreta or research stations (within the guidelines of
international conventions and national laws and customs regulations)
•
long term commitment to, and responsibility
for, the maintenance of plant collections
•
maintenance of research programmes in plant
taxonomy in associated herbaria
•
monitoring of the plants in the collection
•
open to the public
•
promoting conservation through extension and
environmental education activities
•
proper documentation of the collections,
including wild origin
•
undertaking scientific or technical research
on plants in the collections’
(IUCN-Botanic Gardens
Conservation Strategy 1989)
3.
‘…institutions
holding documented collections of living plants for the purposes of scientific
research, conservation, display and education.’ (International Agenda for
Botanic Gardens in Conservation 2000)
And most recently, a definition I proposed at the 6th
Global Botanic Gardens Congress in Geneva in 2017 for what I called 4th generation
botanic gardens (the standard we should be seeking in the modern era):
4.
‘…a
scientifically managed and inspiring landscape of documented plant collections,
where every plant and setting has a purpose’ (Entwisle 2017)
So do any of these definitions help to create our
chronological listicle? The commonality of them all is the need for documented, or slightly more limited labelled, collections. Apart from the
first definition, the plants planted have some purpose. Being open (and welcoming?) to the public is
important implied rather than explicit in the latter two definitions but a
given. The role of ornamental
horticulture comes through in the last two as display in number 3, and in number 4 a reference to inspiring landscape plus the addition of
the word setting as well as plants
when it comes to purpose.
While I like
my aspirational definition for a modern botanic garden (number 4) I don’t see
it an exclusive one. More helpfully for our listicle I would suggest:
- A documented collection of plants to some purpose
- An ornamental and purposeful landscape
- Open and welcoming to the ‘public’
- A scientific (or if you
prefer, evidence-based) approach to their management and use
These points will not please everyone (and I’m sure they
could be improved) but using them, albeit subjectively, one can create a list
of firsts, or nearly firsts. Being first says nothing, of course, about the quality
of the botanic garden, then or now. I’ve decided to adopt the need for the
botanic garden to stay in the same place, more or less (that is, with at least some
common ground throughout its history). Otherwise we need to examine the current
scope and concept of the organisation running a garden, and in some cases trace
back cobwebby threads to botanic-like garden in history. As to botanic gardens
that existed once but not now, they are simply too hard to document and review
(although such a list I would admit has equal validity as mine). The nomenclature
for the organisation, the city and the country are as used today, with the
geographic location in English. Those in italics I don’t think meet all the
criteria above but have some claim to being botanical-like gardens.
So, here then is my list of the Top 10 first botanic gardens, with apologies to all the countries
and regions left out.
First on Earth
1545 Orto
Botanico di Padova; Padua, Italy
1545 Orto
Botanico di Firenze (Giardino dei Semplici); Florence, Italy
First on Earth with strong scientific and ornamental values
1587 Hortus
Botanicus; Leiden, The Netherlands
First in the United Kingdom
1621 University
of Oxford Botanic Garden; Oxford,
UK
First in the Southern Hemisphere
1652 The Company Garden; Cape Town, South Africa
1736 Sir
Seewoosagur Ramgoolam Botanical Garden; Pamplemousses Mauritius
First in the Americas
1850 U.S. Botanic Garden; Washington, USA
1859 Missouri
Botanical Garden; St Louis, USA
First in China
1860 Hong
Kong Zoological and Botanical Park; Hong Kong, China
1929 Nanjing Botanical Garden Memorial Sun Yat-sen; Nanjing,
China
Oh, and the Royal Botanic Garden Sydney was began life in
1816, making it the first in Australia. We don’t talk about this much at the
Royal Botanic Gardens Victoria (1846).
Images: Padua, Oxford, Florence, Leiden (a little faded, from a 1997 slide) and Melbourne.
Postscript: There is plenty here to debate and question, and I'm sure many 'firsts' I've missed. I'll list here feedback that comes in on that score...
Peter Teese (via Facebook, 13 March 2018): Penang Botanical Garden about 133 years old & Perdana 1880s in K L might be of some interest. 1876 Sri Lanka Gampaha Botanical Garden, first rubber from South America.
Ann Harding (via comment on this Blog, 14 march 2018):Saint Vincene, West Indies, has a very old botanic garden but I don't see any mention. Very nice collection including spice trees.
*Occasional posts are called Plant Portraits (in brackets after the blog title and marked with an asterisk). These are usually about things other than, but including at least passing reference to, plants. Often they will be inspired by a book or something else in my cultural life. The idea is borrowed (very loosely and with due deference) from Milan Kundera's 'Novels, Existential Soundings', in his Encounters. These essays were as much, or more, about things other than the book being reviewed. In my case, it could be that every story has a plant to tell...
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