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.
The West End of London is a district of Central London, London, England, west of the City of London and north of the River Thames, in which many of the city's major tourist attractions, shops, businesses, government buildings and entertainment venues, including West End theatres, are concentrated.
Regent's Park is one of the Royal Parks of London. It occupies 410 acres (170 ha) in north-west Inner London, administratively split between the City of Westminster and the Borough of Camden. In addition to its large central parkland and ornamental lake, it contains various structures and organizations both public and private, generally on its periphery, including Regent's University and London Zoo.
Sir Joseph Dalton Hooker was a British botanist and explorer in the 19th century. He was a founder of geographical botany and Charles Darwin's closest friend. For 20 years he served as director of the Royal Botanical Gardens, Kew, succeeding his father, William Jackson Hooker, and was awarded the highest honours of British science.
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.
Sir James Edward Smith was an English botanist and founder of the Linnean Society.
Decimus Burton was one of the foremost English architects and landscapers of the 19th century. He was the foremost Victorian architect in the Roman revival, Greek revival, Georgian neoclassical and Regency styles. He was a founding fellow and vice-president of the Royal Institute of British Architects, and from 1840 architect to the Royal Botanic Society, and an early member of the Athenaeum Club, London, whose clubhouse he designed and which the company of his father, James Burton, the pre-eminent Georgian London property developer, built.
James De Carle Sowerby was a British mineralogist, botanist, and illustrator. He received an education in chemistry.
A conservatory is a building or room having glass or other transparent roofing and walls, used as a greenhouse or a sunroom. Usually it refers to a space attached to a conventional building such as a house, especially in the United Kingdom. Elsewhere, especially in America, it can often refer to a large freestanding glass-walled building in a botanic garden or park, sometimes also called a palm house if tall enough for trees. Municipal conservatories became popular in the early 19th century.
John Lindley FRS was an English botanist, gardener and orchidologist.
Walter Hood Fitch was a botanical illustrator, born in Glasgow, Scotland, who executed some 10,000 drawings for various publications. His work in colour lithograph, including 2700 illustrations for Curtis's Botanical Magazine, produced up to 200 plates per year.
Victoria amazonica is a species of flowering plant, the second largest in the water lily family Nymphaeaceae. It is called Vitória-Régia or Iaupê-Jaçanã in Brazil and Atun Sisac in Inca (Quechua). Its native region is tropical South America, specifically Guyana and the Amazon Basin.
The Carlton Gardens is a World Heritage Site located on the northeastern edge of the Central Business District in the suburb of Carlton, in Melbourne, Australia. A popular picnic and barbecue area, the heritage-listed Carlton Gardens are home to an array of wildlife, including brushtail possums.
The Adelaide Botanic Garden is a 51-hectare (130-acre) public garden at the north-east corner of the Adelaide city centre, in the Adelaide Park Lands. It encompasses a fenced garden on North Terrace and behind it the Botanic Park. Work was begun on the site in 1855, with its official opening to the public on 4 October 1857.
William Thomas Stearn was a British botanist. Born in Cambridge in 1911, he was largely self-educated and developed an early interest in books and natural history. His initial work experience was at a Cambridge bookshop, but he also had an occupation as an assistant in the university botany department. At the age of 29, he married Eldwyth Ruth Alford, who later became his collaborator.
Royal Surrey Gardens were pleasure gardens in Newington, Surrey, London in the Victorian period, slightly east of The Oval. The gardens occupied about 15 acres (6.1 ha) to the east side of Kennington Park Road, including a lake of about 3 acres (1.2 ha). It was the site of Surrey Zoological Gardens and Surrey Music Hall.
Matilda Smith was a botanical artist whose work appeared in Curtis's Botanical Magazine for over forty years. She became the first artist to depict New Zealand's flora in depth, the first official artist of the Royal Botanic Gardens at Kew, and the second woman to become an associate of the Linnaean Society. The standard author abbreviation M.Sm. is used to indicate this person as the author when citing a botanical name.
A rose garden or rosarium is a garden or park, often open to the public, used to present and grow various types of garden roses, and sometimes rose species. Designs vary tremendously and roses may be displayed alongside other plants or grouped by individual variety, colour or class in rose beds. Technically it is a specialized type of shrub garden, but normally treated as a type of flower garden, if only because its origins in Europe go back to at least the Middle Ages in Europe, when roses were effectively the largest and most popular flowers, already existing in numerous garden cultivars.
The Durban Botanic Gardens is situated in the city of Durban, KwaZulu-Natal, South Africa. It is Durban's oldest public institution and Africa's oldest surviving botanical gardens. The gardens cover an area of 15 hectares in a subtropical climate.
The Palm House is a large palm house in the Royal Botanic Gardens, Kew, in London, that specialises in growing palms and other tropical and subtropical plants. It was completed in 1848. Many of its plants are endangered or extinct in the wild. Features include an upper walkway, taking the visitor into the branches of the larger plants. Kew also has the even larger "Temperate House", kept at lower temperatures.
