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A physic garden is a type of herb garden with medicinal plants. Known since at least 800, they are the predecessors of botanical gardens.
A physic garden is a type of herb garden with medicinal plants. Known since at least 800, they are the predecessors of botanical gardens.
Modern botanical gardens were preceded by medieval physic gardens, often monastic gardens, that existed by 800 at least. [2] Gardens of this time included various sections including one for medicinal plants called the herbularis or hortus medicus. [3] 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 academic botanical gardens at Padua and Pisa established in the 1540s. [4] Certainly the founding of many early botanic gardens was instigated by members of the medical profession. [3]
The naturalist William Turner established physic gardens at Cologne, Wells, and Kew; he also wrote to Lord Burleigh recommending that a physic garden be established at Cambridge University with himself at its head. The 1597 Herball, or Generall Historie of Plantes by herbalist John Gerard was said to be the catalogue raisonné of physic gardens, both public and private, which were instituted throughout Europe. [5] It listed 1,030 plants found in his physic garden at Holborn, and was the first such catalogue printed. [1]
The garden in Oxford, founded by Henry Danvers, 1st Earl of Danby, with Jacob Bobart the Elder as Superintendent, dates to 1632. Begun in Westminster and later moved to Chelsea, the Apothecaries founded the Chelsea Physic Garden in 1673, of which Philip Miller, author of The Gardeners Dictionary , was the most notable Director. By 1676, the position of "Keeper of the Physic Garden" was held by the Professor of Botany at the University of Edinburgh. [6]
Some of the earliest physic gardens included: [5]
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 are not native to that region.
Materia medica is a Latin term from the history of pharmacy for the body of collected knowledge about the therapeutic properties of any substance used for healing. The term derives from the title of a work by the Ancient Greek physician Pedanius Dioscorides in the 1st century AD, De materia medica, 'On medical material'.
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 garden has high brick walls which trap heat, giving it a warm micro-climate, and it claims the largest fruiting olive tree in Britain and 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.
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.
Richard Anthony Salisbury was a British botanist. While he carried out valuable work in horticultural and botanical sciences, several bitter disputes caused him to be ostracised by his contemporaries.
John Lindley FRS was an English botanist, gardener and orchidologist.
Andrea Cesalpino was a Florentine physician, philosopher and botanist.
Luca Ghini was an Italian physician and botanist, notable as the creator of the first recorded herbarium, as well as the first botanical garden in Europe.
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.
John Forbes Royle, British botanist and teacher of materia medica (pharmacology), was born in Kanpur in India in 1798. He was in charge of the botanical garden at Saharanpur and played a role in the development of economic botany in India.
Robert Wight was a Scottish surgeon in the East India Company, whose professional career was spent entirely in southern India, where his greatest achievements were in botany – as an economic botanist and leading taxonomist in south India. He contributed to the introduction of American cotton. As a taxonomist he described 110 new genera and 1267 new species of flowering plants. He employed Indian botanical artists to illustrate many plants collected by himself and Indian collectors he trained. Some of these illustrations were published by William Hooker in Britain, but from 1838 he published a series of illustrated works in Madras including the uncoloured, six-volume Icones Plantarum Indiae Orientalis (1838–53) and two hand-coloured, two-volume works, the Illustrations of Indian Botany (1838–50) and Spicilegium Neilgherrense (1845–51). By the time he retired from India in 1853 he had published 2464 illustrations of Indian plants. The standard author abbreviation Wight is used to indicate this person as the author when citing a botanical name.
The Orto Botanico di Firenze, also known as the Giardino dei Semplici, the "Garden of simples", is a botanical garden maintained by the University of Florence. It is located at Via Micheli, 3, Florence, Italy, and open weekday mornings.
Thomas Moore was a British gardener and botanist. An expert on ferns and fern allies from the British Isles, he served as Curator of the Society of Apothecaries Garden from 1848 to 1887. In 1855 he authored The Ferns of Great Britain and Ireland.The standard author abbreviation T.Moore is used to indicate this person as the author when citing a botanical name.
Elizabeth Blackwell was a botanical illustrator best known as drawer and engraver of the plates for A Curious Herbal, published between 1737 and 1739. It illustrated medicinal plants in a reference work for the use of physicians and apothecaries.
The Orto Botanico dell'Università di Bologna, also known as the Orto Botanico di Bologna, is a botanical garden operated by the University of Bologna. It is located at Via Irnerio, 42, 40126 Bologna, Italy, and open daily except Mondays.
The history of botany examines the human effort to understand life on Earth by tracing the historical development of the discipline of botany—that part of natural science dealing with organisms traditionally treated as plants.
James Sutherland was the first Professor of Physic (Botany) at the University of Edinburgh, from 1676 to 1705. He was intendant of the Physic Garden, and his innovative publication Hortus Medicus Edinburgensis placed Scotland at the forefront of European botany. He was also a renowned coin collector.
Isaac Rand (1674–1743) was an English botanist and apothecary, who was a lecturer and director at the Chelsea Physic Garden.
Botanical expeditions are scientific voyages designed to explore the flora of a particular region, either as a specific design or part of a larger expedition. A naturalist or botanist would be responsible for identification, description and collection of specimens. In some cases the plants might be collected by the person in the field, but described and named by a government sponsored scientist at a botanical garden or university. For example, species collected on the Lewis and Clark Expedition were described and named by Frederick Traugott Pursh.
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