Botanical garden
A botanical garden or botanic garden is a garden with a documented collection of living plants for the purpose of scientific research, conservation, display, and education. Plants in larger gardens are often labelled with their botanical names and additional information. It may contain specialist plant collections such as cacti and other succulent plants, herb gardens, or plants from particular parts of the world. There may be glasshouses or shadehouses with special collections such as tropical plants, alpine plants, or other exotic plants that are not native to the local region.
Most are at least partly open to the public, and may offer guided tours, public programming such as workshops, courses, educational displays, art exhibitions, book rooms, open-air theatrical and musical performances, and other entertainment.
Botanical gardens are often run by universities or other scientific research organizations, and usually have associated herbaria and research programmes in plant taxonomy or some other aspect of botanical science. In principle, their role is to maintain documented collections of living plants for the purposes of scientific research, conservation, display, and education, although this will depend on the resources available and the special interests pursued at each particular garden. The staff will normally include botanists as well as gardeners.
Many botanical gardens offer diploma or certificate programs in horticulture, botany and taxonomy. There are many internship opportunities offered to aspiring horticulturists, as well as opportunities for students and researchers to use the collection for their studies.
Definitions
The New Royal Horticultural Society Dictionary of Gardening points out that among the various kinds of organizations known as botanical gardens, there are many that are in modern times public gardens with little scientific activity. It cited a tighter definition published by the World Wildlife Fund and IUCN when launching the "Botanic Gardens Conservation Strategy" in 1989: "A botanic garden is a garden containing scientifically ordered and maintained collections of plants, usually documented and labelled, and open to the public for the purposes of recreation, education and research."This has been refined by Botanic Gardens Conservation International to the following definition which "encompasses the spirit of a true botanic garden": "A botanic garden is an institution holding documented collections of living plants for the purposes of scientific research, conservation, display and education."
The following definition was produced by staff of the Liberty Hyde Bailey Hortorium of Cornell University in 1976. It covers in some detail the many functions and activities generally associated with botanical gardens:
This broad outline is then expanded:
Role and functions
All botanical gardens have their own special interests. In a paper on the role of botanical gardens, Ferdinand von Mueller, the director of the Royal Botanic Gardens, Melbourne, stated, "in all cases the objects must be mainly scientific and predominantly instructive". He detailed many of the objectives being pursued by the world's botanical gardens in the middle of the 19th century, when European gardens were at their height. Many of these are listed below to give a sense of the scope of botanical gardens' activities at that time, and the ways in which they differed from parks or what he called "public pleasure gardens":- availability of plants for scientific research
- display of plant diversity in form and use
- display of plants of particular regions
- plants sometimes grown within their particular families
- plants grown for their seed or rarity
- major timber trees
- plants of economic significance
- glasshouse plants of different climates
- all plants accurately labelled
- records kept of plants and their performance
- catalogues of holdings published periodically
- research facilities utilising the living collections
- studies in plant taxonomy
- examples of different vegetation types
- student education
- a herbarium
- selection and introduction of ornamental and other plants to commerce
- studies of plant chemistry
- report on the effects of plants on livestock
- at least one collector maintained doing field work
Worldwide network
Worldwide, there are now about 1800 botanical gardens and arboreta in about 150 countries of which about 550 are in Europe, 200 in North America, and an increasing number in East Asia. These gardens attract about 300 million visitors a year.Historically, botanical gardens exchanged plants through the publication of seed lists. This was a means of transferring both plants and information between botanical gardens. This system continues today, though with attention to the risks of genetic piracy and transmission of invasive species.
The International Association of Botanic Gardens was formed in 1954 as a worldwide organisation affiliated to the International Union of Biological Sciences. More recently, coordination has also been provided by Botanic Gardens Conservation International, which has the mission "To mobilise botanic gardens and engage partners in securing plant diversity for the well-being of people and the planet".
Regional coordination is seen in the United States with the American Public Gardens Association, while in Australasia there is the Botanic Gardens of Australia and New Zealand.
History
The history of botanical gardens is closely linked to the history of botany itself. The botanical gardens of the 16th and 17th centuries were medicinal gardens, but the idea of a botanical garden changed to encompass displays of the beautiful, strange, new, and sometimes economically important plant trophies being returned from the European colonies and other distant lands. In the 18th century, they became more educational in function, demonstrating the latest plant classification systems devised by botanists working in the associated herbaria as they tried to order these new treasures. Then, in the 19th and 20th centuries, the trend was towards a combination of specialist and eclectic collections demonstrating aspects of both horticulture and botany.Precursors
The idea of "scientific" gardens used specifically for the study of plants dates back to antiquity. The origin of modern botanical gardens is generally traced to the appointment of botany professors to the medical faculties of universities in 16th-century Renaissance Italy, which entailed curating a medicinal garden. However, the objectives, content, and audience of today's botanic gardens more closely resemble that of the grandiose gardens of antiquity and the educational garden of Theophrastus in the Lyceum of ancient Athens.Grand gardens of ancient history
Near-Eastern royal gardens, set aside for economic use or display and containing at least some plants gained by special collecting trips or military campaigns abroad, are known from the second millennium BCE in ancient Egypt, Mesopotamia, Crete, Mexico and China. In about 2800 BCE, the Chinese Emperor Shen Nung sent collectors to distant regions searching for plants with economic or medicinal value. It has also been suggested that the Spanish colonization of Mesoamerica influenced the history of the botanical garden. Gardens in Tenochtitlan, established by king Nezahualcoyotl, as well as gardens in Chalco and elsewhere, greatly impressed the Spanish invaders, not only with their appearance, but also because the indigenous Aztecs employed many more medicinal plants than did the classical world of Europe.Early medieval gardens in Islamic Spain resembled later botanic gardens, an example being the 11th-century Huerta del Rey garden of physician and author Ibn Wafid in Toledo. This was taken over by garden chronicler Ibn Bassal until the Christian conquest in 1085 CE. Ibn Bassal then founded a garden in Seville, most of its plants being collected on a botanical expedition that included Morocco, Persia, Sicily, and Egypt. The medical school of Montpellier was also founded by Spanish Arab physicians, and by 1250 CE, it included a physic garden, but the site was not given botanic garden status until 1593.
Physic gardens
Botanical gardens developed from physic gardens, whose main purpose was to cultivate herbs for medical use as well as research and experimentation. Such gardens have a long history. In Europe, for example, Aristotle is said to have had a physic garden in the Lyceum at Athens, which was used for educational purposes and for the study of botany. This was inherited, or possibly set up, by his pupil Theophrastus, the "Father of Botany". There is some debate among science historians whether this garden was ordered and scientific enough to be considered "botanical"; instead, they attribute the earliest known botanical garden in Europe to the botanist and pharmacologist Antonius Castor, mentioned by Pliny the Elder in the 1st century.The forerunners of modern botanical gardens are generally regarded as being the medieval monastic physic gardens that originated after the decline of the Roman Empire at the time of Emperor Charlemagne. These contained a hortus, a garden used mostly for vegetables, and another section set aside for specially labelled medicinal plants; this was called the herbularis or hortus medicus—more generally known as a physic garden—and a viridarium or orchard. Such gardens were given impetus by Charlemagne's Capitulary de Villis, which listed 73 herbs to be used in the physic gardens of his dominions. Many of these had already been introduced to British gardens. Pope Nicholas V set aside part of the Vatican grounds in 1447 for a garden of medicinal plants that were used to promote the teaching of botany, and this was a forerunner to the University gardens at Padua and Pisa established in the 1540s. Certainly, the founding of many early botanic gardens was instigated by members of the medical profession.