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. It is their mandate as a botanical garden that plants are labelled with their botanical names. It may contain specialist plant collections such as cacti and other succulent plants, herb gardens, plants from particular parts of the world, and so on; there may be glasshouses or shadehouses, again with special collections such as tropical plants, alpine plants, or other exotic plants that don't grow natively within that region.
The Chelsea Physic Garden was established as the Apothecaries' Garden in London, England, in 1673 by the Worshipful Society of Apothecaries to grow plants to be used as medicines. This four acre physic garden, the term here referring to the science of healing, is among the oldest botanical gardens in Britain, after the University of Oxford Botanic Garden. Its rock garden is the oldest in Europe devoted to alpine plants and Mediterranean plants. The largest fruiting olive tree in Britain is there, protected by the garden's heat-trapping high brick walls, along with what is doubtless the world's northernmost grapefruit growing outdoors. Jealously guarded during the tenure of the Worshipful Society of Apothecaries, the garden became a registered charity in 1983 and was opened to the general public for the first time.
John Stevens Henslow was an English Anglican priest, botanist and geologist. He is best remembered as friend and mentor to his pupil Charles Darwin.
The Department of Plant Sciences is a department of the University of Cambridge that conducts research and teaching in plant sciences. It was established in 1904, although the university has had a professor of botany since 1724.
The Royal Botanic Garden Edinburgh (RBGE) is a scientific centre for the study of plants, their diversity and conservation, as well as a popular tourist attraction. Founded in 1670 as a physic garden to grow medicinal plants, today it occupies four sites across Scotland—Edinburgh, Dawyck, Logan and Benmore—each with its own specialist collection. The RBGE's living collection consists of more than 13,302 plant species, whilst the herbarium contains in excess of 3 million preserved specimens.
The University of Oxford Botanic Garden is the oldest botanic garden in Great Britain and one of the oldest scientific gardens in the world. The garden was founded in 1621 as a physic garden growing plants for medicinal research. Today it contains over 5,000 different plant species on 1.8 ha. It is one of the most diverse yet compact collections of plants in the world and includes representatives from over 90% of the higher plant families.
Daniel Oliver, FRS was an English botanist.
Stuart Max Walters was a British botanist and academic.
Glasgow Botanic Gardens is a botanical garden located in the West End of Glasgow, Scotland. It features several glasshouses, the most notable of which is the Kibble Palace.
The University of Copenhagen Botanical Garden, usually referred to simply as Copenhagen Botanical Garden, is a botanical garden located in the centre of Copenhagen, Denmark. It covers an area of 10 hectares and is particularly noted for its extensive complex of historical glasshouses dating from 1874.
Professor David John Mabberley, is a British-born botanist, educator and writer. Among his varied scientific interests is the taxonomy of tropical plants, especially trees of the families Labiatae, Meliaceae and Rutaceae. He is perhaps best known for his plant dictionary The plant-book. A portable dictionary of the vascular plants. The third edition was published in 2008 as Mabberley's Plant-book, for which he was awarded the Engler Medal in Silver in 2009. As of June 2017 Mabberley's Plant-book is in its fourth edition.
The hybrid cultivar Ulmus × hollandica 'Cicestria', commonly known as the 'Chichester Elm', was cloned at the beginning of the 18th century from a tree growing at Chichester Hall, Rawreth, near Danbury, Essex, England, then the home of Thomas Holt White FRS, brother of the naturalist Gilbert White. The tree was first recorded by country parson and botanist Adam Buddle in south-east Essex in 1711, and appeared as U. cicestria in an 1801 catalogue. 'Cicestria' is the original Ulmus × hollandica 'Vegeta', but suffered confusion with the later Huntingdon Elm cultivar by John Claudius Loudon who, without consulting Lindley, accorded the epithet 'Vegeta' to Huntingdon Elm in 1838, as he found the two indistinguishable. J. E. Little in The Journal of Botany (1923) agreed that Buddle's leaves-specimen of Chichester Elm in the Sloane Herbarium seemed to be the same cultivar as Huntingdon Elm: "If so, this elm [Chichester] was in existence and mature some years before the reputed raising of the Huntingdon Elm by Wood of Huntingdon 'about 1746'."
The Field Elm cultivar Ulmus minor 'Sowerbyi', commonly known as the Sowerby Elm, was described by Moss in The Cambridge British Flora (1914). The tree, once referred to as the 'Norfolk Elm' by Smith, was commonly found in the hedgerows and woods of Norfolk, Cambridgeshire, and Huntingdonshire in the early 20th century before the advent of Dutch elm disease. Melville considered it a hybrid of 'Coritana'.
Mark Wayne Chase is a US-born British botanist. He is noted for work in plant classification and evolution, and one of the instigators of the Angiosperm Phylogeny Group-classification for flowering plants which is partly based on DNA studies. In particular he has researched orchids, and currently investigates ploidy and hybridization in Nicotiana.
John Scott Lennox Gilmour VMH FLS was a British botanist, curator of the Cambridge University Herbarium, and later director of Cambridge University Botanic Garden and Fellow of Clare College, Cambridge.
Graham Dugald Duncan(born 1959) is a South African botanist and specialist bulb horticulturalist at the Kirstenbosch National Botanical Garden, Cape Town, South Africa.
Reginald Radcliffe Cory was an influential British horticulturalist.
Professor John Stewart Parker is a British botanist and was the fifth Director, Cambridge University Botanic Garden, succeeding Donald Pigott.
Edward Martyn Rix is a British botanist, collector, horticulturist and author. Following completion of a PhD on Fritillaria at Cambridge University, he worked in Zürich, Switzerland and at the Royal Horticultural Society gardens at Wisley. He is the author of many books and articles on plants and horticulture and is the editor of Curtis's Botanical Magazine, based at the Royal Botanic Gardens, Kew in London.
