Digitalis is a genus of about 20 species of herbaceous perennial plants, shrubs, and biennials, commonly called foxgloves.
William TurnerMA was an English divine and reformer, a physician and a natural historian. He has been called "The father of English botany." He studied medicine in Italy, and was a friend of the great Swiss naturalist, Conrad Gessner. He was an early herbalist and ornithologist, and it is in these fields that the most interest lies today. He is known as being one of the first "parson-naturalists" in England.
Scilla is a genus of about 30 to 80 species of bulb-forming perennial herbaceous plants in the family Asparagaceae, subfamily Scilloideae. Sometimes called the squills in English, they are native to woodlands, subalpine meadows, and seashores throughout Europe, Africa and the Middle East. A few species are also naturalized in Australasia and North America. Their flowers are usually blue, but white, pink, and purple types are known; most flower in early spring, but a few are autumn-flowering. Several Scilla species are valued as ornamental garden plants.
Corylus avellana, the common hazel, is a species of flowering plant in the birch family Betulaceae. It is native to Europe and western Asia. It is an important component of the hedgerows that were the traditional field boundaries in lowland England. The wood was traditionally grown as coppice, the poles cut being used for wattle-and-daub building and agricultural fencing.
Leonhart Fuchs, sometimes spelled Leonhard Fuchs, and cited in Latin as Leonhartus Fuchsius was a German physician and botanist. His chief notability is as the author of a large book about plants and their uses as medicines, a herbal, which was first published in 1542 in Latin. It has about 500 accurate and detailed drawings of plants, which were printed from woodcuts. The drawings are the book's most notable advance on its predecessors. Although drawings had been used in other herbal books, Fuchs' book proved and emphasized high-quality drawings as the most telling way to specify what a plant name stands for.
A herbal is a book containing the names and descriptions of plants, usually with information on their medicinal, tonic, culinary, toxic, hallucinatory, aromatic, or magical powers, and the legends associated with them. A herbal may also classify the plants it describes, may give recipes for herbal extracts, tinctures, or potions, and sometimes include mineral and animal medicaments in addition to those obtained from plants. Herbals were often illustrated to assist plant identification.
Valerius Cordus was a German physician, botanist and pharmacologist who authored the first pharmacopoeia North of the Alps and one of the most celebrated herbals in history. He is also widely credited with developing a method for synthesizing ether.
Rembert Dodoens was a Flemish physician and botanist, also known under his Latinized name Rembertus Dodonaeus. He has been called the father of botany. The standard author abbreviation Dodoens is used to indicate this person as the author when citing a botanical name.
Symphyotrichum novae-angliae is a species of flowering plant in the aster family (Asteraceae) native to central and eastern North America. Commonly known as New England aster, hairy Michaelmas-daisy, or Michaelmas daisy, it is a perennial, herbaceous plant usually between 30 and 120 centimeters tall and 60 to 90 cm wide.
Mathias de l'Obel, Mathias de Lobel or Matthaeus Lobelius was a Flemish physician and plant enthusiast who was born in Lille, Flanders, in what is now Hauts-de-France, France, and died at Highgate, London, England. He studied at the University of Montpellier and practiced medicine in the low countries and England, including positions as personal physicians to two monarchs. A member of the sixteenth-century Flemish School of Botany, he wrote a series of major treatises on plants in both Latin and Dutch. He was the first botanist to appreciate the distinction between monocotyledons and dicotyledons. The Lobelia plant is named after him.
The Linda Hall Library is a privately endowed American library of science, engineering and technology located in Kansas City, Missouri, sitting "majestically on a 14-acre (5.7 ha) urban arboretum." It is the "largest independently funded public library of science, engineering and technology in North America" and "among the largest science libraries in the world."
This article lists notable events in the history of botany in Britain.
Botanical nomenclature is the formal, scientific naming of plants. It is related to, but distinct from taxonomy. Plant taxonomy is concerned with grouping and classifying plants; botanical nomenclature then provides names for the results of this process. The starting point for modern botanical nomenclature is Linnaeus' Species Plantarum of 1753. Botanical nomenclature is governed by the International Code of Nomenclature for algae, fungi, and plants (ICN), which replaces the International Code of Botanical Nomenclature (ICBN). Fossil plants are also covered by the code of nomenclature.
Pseudo-Apuleius is the name given in modern scholarship to the author of a 4th-century herbal known as Pseudo-Apuleius Herbarius or Herbarium Apuleii Platonici. The author of the text apparently wished readers to think that it was by Apuleius of Madaura (124–170 CE), the Roman poet and philosopher, but modern scholars do not believe this attribution. Little or nothing else is known of Pseudo-Apuleius apart from this.
Serapion the Younger was the author of a medicinal-botany book entitled The Book of Simple Medicaments. The book is dated to the 12th or 13th century. He is called "the Younger" to distinguish him from Serapion the Elder, aka Yahya ibn Sarafyun, an earlier medical writer with whom he was often confused. Serapion the Younger's Simple Medicaments was likely written in Arabic, but no Arabic copy survives, and there is no record of a knowledge of the book among medieval Arabic authors. The book was translated to Latin in the late 13th century and was widely circulated in late medieval Latin medical circles. Portions of the Latin text make a good match with portions of a surviving Arabic text Kitab al-adwiya al-mufrada attributed to Ibn Wafid. The entire Latin text is very heavily reliant on medieval Arabic medicinal literature; and it is essentially just a compilation of such literature. It is exceedingly clear that the book was not originally written in a Latin language.
The year 1542 in science and technology included a number of events, some of which are listed here.
Symphyotrichum lanceolatum is a species of flowering plant in the family Asteraceae native to North America. Common names include panicled aster, lance-leaved aster, and white panicled aster. It is a perennial, herbaceous plant that may reach 1.5 meters tall or more, sometimes approaching 2 meters. The lance-shaped leaves are generally hairless but may feel slightly rough to the touch on the top because of tiny bristles. The flowers grow in clusters and branch in panicles. They have 16–50 white ray florets that are up to 14 millimeters long and sometimes tinged pink or purple. The flower centers consist of disk florets that begin as yellow and become purple as they mature.
Albrecht Meyer also known as Albertus Meyer in Latinised form, was a botanical illustrator noted for his more than 500 plant images in Leonhart Fuchs's epic pre-Linnean publication of 1542, De Historia Stirpium Commentarii Insignes, published in Latin and Greek, and almost immediately translated into German. At the time it was regarded as one of the most beautifully illustrated books on plants and a jewel in the crown of German Renaissance.
Gherardo Cibo also known by the alias of Ulisse Severini da Cingoli was an artist and a herbalist from Italy. The herbarium that he began in 1532 is the oldest surviving example of the method invented in Italy by his contemporaries and is preserved in Rome. His illustrations of plants show plants in the foreground with landscapes and details of people and places in the background.
'Plantarum seu stirpium historia' is an illustrated botanical text by the Flemish physician Lobelius (Matthias de l'Obel and published in Antwerp in 1576. Later, he translated it into Flemish in 1581 with the title Kruydtboeck. This was l'Obel's second work, following publication of the Stirpium adversaria nova in London in 1570. This work was intended as a companion publication to his Stirpium adversaria nova, and incorporates a revised version of the latter, as Nova stirpium adversaria.
