Sea voyages bring exotic plants in the Age of Discovery, and botanical gardens elevate science and horticulture.
sixteenth through eighteenth centuries
In school we study the English Civil War and Glorious Revolution, the American and French Revolutions. But at the same time as these momentous political events were occurring, another transformation was touching every dimension of the lives of every person great and small. The story lies in the sea voyages of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries during the latter part of the Age of Discovery and their success in finding and returning to Europe new and productive plants.
This transformation unfolded first not on sea but on land. Silk was only one of the commodities carried along the Silk Road from China to Europe. Precious resins of myrrh and frankincense, spices including cinnamon, cumin, cardamom, and nutmeg, and countless other goods were loaded on camels, wagons, horses, and elephants to travel the four thousand miles from China to Europe beginning as early as 200 bc. But in the fifteenth century the road became very difficult and discouraging for traders. The Mongol Empire that had controlled the route was disintegrating. Local infighting of Arab tribes made the road through Persia dangerous, and when Constantinople fell in 1453 to the Ottoman Turks, trade was closed by local Arab leaders. Muslim reprisals for the reconquest of Andalusia and Alhambra by Catholic Spain further limited access to and from the West.
These events inspired adventurers to seek a sea route to China. The daring explorations of Christopher Columbus, Ferdinand Magellan, and Vasco da Gama set the stage. As seafarers rounded the capes at the southern tips of Africa and South America, the expanded world was ablaze with possibilities. The mighty oaks, chestnuts, beeches, and elms of Europe were felled by the thousands to build wooden sailing ships for these bold ventures.
Of flowers, spread athwart the garden. Aye
Name upon name assails thy ears . . .
Gaze on them as they grow, see how the plant
Burgeons by stages into flower and fruit . . .
Asleep within the seed the power lies.
—Johann Wolfgang von Goethe
At first the explorers sought gold, silver, precious metals, and spices. But by the beginning of the seventeenth century, seeds and plants were the chief object. Although the passage was long with many a voyage ending in shipwreck, the potential gain was worth the risk. Live plants would bring the most money in Europe because the difficulty of transporting them made them rare. Kept in the hold of the ship, they had to be periodically brought on deck for air and sunlight where they were also exposed to the salt spray. Most succumbed.
The story of the explorers, botanists, naturalists, and soldiers of fortune in the Age of Discovery has made many a book. Here examples from the beginning of the seventeenth century and the end of the eighteenth century are illustrative.
Robert Cecil so treasured his head gardener, John Tradescant, that he had his portrait, complete with flowers and rake, carved as a post for the grand staircase at Hatfield House in Hertfordshire where it can be seen today.
John Tradescant the Elder, born in 1570, worked his way up the profession of gardener and at age forty was named head gardener to Robert Cecil, first Earl of Salisbury, at Hatfield House. Cecil sent him to the Netherlands to purchase fruit trees, beginning what was to be a life of travel for Tradescant, increasing and satisfying his curiosity about the strange world beyond English shores. After Cecil’s death, he became gardener for James I, traveling to Russia, the Arctic, and Algiers in search of new plants for his king. Among the plants he found were those in the genus that would one day bear his name, Tradescantia. On the road and from returning sailors, he also gathered oddities—shells, semiprecious stones, dried animal skins, and native masks, weapons, household tools, and vessels. He opened his collection to the curious, creating the world’s first public museum which would later form the basis of the Ashmolean Museum of Oxford University.
Following in his father’s profession, John Tradescant the Younger became head gardener to King Charles I who sent him to Amsterdam to purchase the coveted and dearly priced tulip bulbs newly introduced into Dutch horticulture. Then in 1628, when the English colony of Virginia was but twenty years old, John went to Jamestown. There, with the help of an Indian woman, he combed the surrounding forests, meadows, and swamps for plants yet unknown in England. When he returned home some nine years later, he brought, among other plants, phlox, asters, the bald cypress, and the tulip tree, all of which became prized by English gardeners. He is buried with his father and son at Saint Mary’s Church Lambeth, now the Garden Museum.
Early in the nineteenth century the famous seaman Vice-Admiral William Bligh was buried in the same churchyard. Today he is remembered as commander of hms Bounty whose crew mutinied, setting Bligh and a handful of loyal officers and men adrift in the South China Sea in a twenty-three-foot open boat with no charts. Their six weeks at sea to reach what is now East Timor is remembered as one of the greatest sea voyages of history.
What is less well known is that the Bounty’s mission was to bring the breadfruit plant (Artocarpus altilis) from Tahiti to Jamaica. Breadfruit was recognized as highly nutritious and easy to grow, fruiting for the better part of a year. Jamaican plantation owners, seeking to acquire this low-cost food for their slaves, formed a cartel. To lead the expedition they hired Bligh who had been sea master on the third and final voyage of the famous explorer Captain James Cook. Because of the mutiny the Bounty mission failed, but Bligh was hired again and this time succeeded in delivering six hundred plants to Saint Vincent and Jamaica. His tomb at the Garden Museum in London acknowledges the “celebrated navigator who first transplanted the bread-fruit tree from Otaheite to the West Indies, . . . died beloved, respected and lamented, December 7th, 1817.”
In 1796 Thomas Goose depicted Captain William Bligh directing the gathering of breadfruit plants in Tahiti.
When he returned to England in 1637, John Tradescant the Younger brought Magnolia virginiana, one of the oldest living plants.
In the 150 years between the Tradescants and Bligh’s voyage dozens of other European botanists, naturalists, explorers, and seamen searched for seeds and plants, doubling the size of the world known to Europeans and extending by thousands the number of plants available in any one place. New fruits and vegetables made good eating and good nutrition and provided new sources of income for farmers. The inventory of plants for medicine grew exponentially as did the research in their use. These developments changed local ecologies, sometimes introducing plants that proved invasive in their new homes.
By the start of the nineteenth century, landscape and garden designers had options never known before and they sought these treasures from abroad for their clients and patrons. Plant collecting became the object of newly founded botanical gardens, the focus of scientific pursuit, the avocation of many an aristocrat or the merely curious, and, finally, the obsession of the Western world. Fortunes and empires were won and lost sometimes on the basis of a single plant as investors bet on its success. And some sought to organize the vastly expanding knowledge of plants, work that would be essential to the future of botany, agriculture, and landscape design.
Padua, Italy
With the influx of plants from around the world it was necessary and inevitable that there would be efforts to classify plants, both those that were native to Europe and those newly brought from overseas. Common names of plants varied from place to place and sometimes different plants were called by the same name. To correctly identify plants, long descriptions were necessary. The botanical gardens were founded to collect the new plants and to organize them in a logical system to aid in their study. Since medicinal plants were considered the most important, they became the focus of the earliest of these gardens.
With the waning of the Middle Ages, the study of medicine moved from the monasteries to the universities and their medical schools. L’Orto Botanico of Padua is the oldest botanical garden in the Western world still on its original site and adhering to its original design. Founded in 1545 by the Venetian senate only a half century after Columbus discovered America, the garden featuring natural remedies soon became a study site for the University of Padua medical faculty and students. Luigi Squalermo became the first director and here he wrote the Semplici, an herbal describing 1,540 plants reputed to have healing properties, which became a reference work for other botanists.
Only a few years later, more than one thousand plants were cultivated in the Padua botanical garden, coming mostly from the Mediterranean and then Asia. Included in the inundation were many that were not medicinal plants and the focus of study shifted from the healing property of plants to the plants themselves.
A garden’s purpose is—or should be—the first consideration in its design. The Padua garden is surrounded by a high circular wall, needed to protect the rare plants from theft and vandalism. Within the circle is a square following the paradise garden form with four paths radiating at right angles from the center fountain. The four quadrants thus created may recall the four humors of the body as described by Hippocrates, a doctrine to which both Christian and Muslim physicians subscribed. Stone-divided beds make identification clear as each plant, separated from another, is labeled. The beds are of varying geometric shapes fitting into the quadrants of the square or together forming an inner circle adjacent to the surrounding circular wall. The medicinal plants were organized in beds by the parts of the body and diseases they were believed to heal, the exotics by the regions of the world from which they came or by characteristics they held in common. The original design served well for the study of plants over succeeding centuries, accommodating additions such as a library and laboratories.
Among the most notable of the now thousands of plants at L’Orto Botanico in Padua is Chamaerops humilis, known as European fan palm or Mediterranean dwarf palm. The northernmost naturally occurring palm, it grows in Italy, Malta, and coastal Spain. The Padua palm was planted in 1588 and remains one of the world’s oldest living plants. Two hundred years after its planting the German poet and naturalist Johann Wolfgang von Goethe visited the garden and studied the palm. Its successively differentiated leaves from bottom to top inspired his treatise The Metamorphosis of Plants, in which he argues that all plants come from a common plant. He looked for the archetypal plant and his observations and theories along with those of many others stimulated new thinking that transformed botanical and biological science in the nineteenth century, culminating in the work of Charles Darwin. Recognized as the birthplace of science and scientific exchange for its early plant collecting and study of botany, L’Orto Botanico of Padua remains an important botanical garden to this day.
The central fountain is a convenient way to water plants. The tower to the right houses the Goethe palm.
High wall and stone-bordered plant beds remain today as they were at the Padua garden’s origin.
At over four hundred years, the Goethe palm may be an old lady but thrives, even now producing offspring.
Leiden, the Netherlands
Carolus Clusius had already achieved an international reputation as a botanist when, in 1593, he accepted the position as first prefect of the Hortus Botanicus in Leiden. It was the beginning of the long and distinguished history of one of the world’s great botanical gardens.
“Have you heard? Van Tol has got one. Van Tol, the plumber who lives on Oude Vest, he’s got one!” “What do you mean?” “You know, that thing, the tulip—the flower with stripes. Although I don’t know what he sees in it. His wife went mad: forty guilders for a small egg-shaped thing. And you can’t even see it. It’s in the ground. Of course, he says it will be worth eighty guilder tomorrow. That’s if he can sell it. I definitely wouldn’t buy it. A load of hot air if you ask me!”
—Stans van der Veen, Hortus Botanicus
In Leiden, the first city of the Netherlands to throw off the Spanish yoke and the first to establish a university in the Protestant Netherlands, the university occupied buildings once a convent but abandoned during the Protestant Reformation. The space within the cloister had served the nuns as a garden for medicinal herbs. Now it would once again be a place for growing plants but, under the direction of Clusius, not for medicine but rather for the study of botany. Clusius would reach out to his international network to gather plants from France where he had studied medicine at the University of Montpellier, from Germany where he had lived, and from Vienna where he had designed a botanical garden for Maximilian II. He would bring hundreds of plants with him for the new Hortus Botanicus at the University of Leiden.
The ‘Semper Augustus’ tulip, shown here in a seventeenth-century watercolor, was sold for the highest price of all tulips during the craze of 1637.
Among his collection were bulbs, of special interest to Clusius. While in Vienna he had met the ambassador to the Turkish court. Ambassador Ogier Ghiselin de Busbecq, having experienced the Turkish coastline, mountains, sandy soil, and the hills aglow in spring with crocuses, narcissus, fritillaries, and white Madonna lilies, obliged Clusius’s passion by returning from Constantinople with bulbs as well as seeds.
Arriving in Leiden, Clusius set to the task of laying out the garden. He divided the space into four quadrants, each in turn divided into rectangular beds. A bower rather than a fountain stood at the center. Arches marked the entry to some of the paths. Wooden tuteurs supported climbing vines. Although the garden measured only 115 by 131 feet, Clusius managed to include in it more than one thousand different plants. He made a map of the garden, noting the location of each plant and showing how he had laid them out not according to their medicinal use but by common characteristics. Like any good botanist, he marked each carefully and waited through the long first winter.
When spring came, in the special corner bed that Clusius had set aside and fenced for his bulbs, dark reddish tips showed through the cold earth. A few weeks later Tulipa ‘Semper Augustus’ opened, the first tulip to bloom in the Netherlands. Enthusiasm for the new striped tulips seized the world of horticulture and gardening. King James I sent his gardener John Tradescant to buy these unusual bulbs, only one of hundreds of investors who came to Amsterdam to bid on the fascinating flowers. Costs skyrocketed, setting off unparalleled financial speculation. Finally, in 1637, the prices went too high and the tulip market crashed, bringing many to ruin. Yet the love for tulips continued unabated, and their cost became more reasonable as the number of growers increased. Holland’s national industry was born. Today at the Aalsmeer Flower Auction flowers are checked and graded before being sold to bidders around the world.
The tulip was not the only exotic flower brought into the Netherlands. The Dutch East India Company established trade with and control over the South Sea Islands, now Indonesia. From Jakarta it did eight times as much business as the now more famous English East India Company until the Dutch company’s collapse in 1800. With access to a wealth of unusual plants in the South Seas and ships constantly returning to Amsterdam with plants among the cargo, the study of botany flourished.
One visitor who was to add further distinction to Leiden was a young Swede, Carl Linnaeus. He had studied at universities in Lund and Uppsala and made a pioneering expedition to Lapland in search of plants. He was making a name for himself in the world of horticulture for his study of the sexual characteristics of plants and for his thinking about classification. The flood of new plants made imperative a uniform taxonomy. Linnaeus came to Leiden in 1735 where he remained to publish his Systema Naturae in which he described three kingdoms of nature: plants, animals, and rocks. In the years that followed he developed the system of binomial nomenclature for botanists and horticulturists. Based on the structure of Latin, it used the genus as the first identifier and the species (specific epithet) as the second, thereby ending the need for extensive descriptions and providing instead a short and accurate means of identifying a plant. There were others working on the problem of classification but Linnaeus’s system eventually won the day. It remains the system used in botany and horticulture today, although identities are changing as a result of using dna to determine a plant’s lineage.
For the more than four hundred years since its founding, the Hortus Botanicus of the University of Leiden has continued to be at the forefront of botanical research. Plant beds laid out by botanical order were added. An orangery for exotic plants was built in the eighteenth century; a library and laboratories followed. Albert Einstein served as a special visiting professor during the 1920s. Today the collection includes over ten thousand plants. The Naturalis Biodiversity Center highlights the importance of ecological diversity and educates the public as well as the university students about issues of sustainability.
The fenced area at the left was reserved by Clusius for his precious bulbs. His carefully kept lists and plan enabled the re-creation of his garden on the original site in 2006.
At the Aalsmeer Flower Auction, twenty million flowers change hands each day.
Linnaeus, once in residence at the university’s botanical garden, is honored at Leiden for his system of classifying plants.
London, England
Site selection is a crucial first step in designing a garden. Teaching about medicinal plants was the chief purpose of the Chelsea Physic Garden, dictating not only its design but its location. Founded by the Worshipful Society of Apothecaries, the garden was to be the training ground for future pharmacists, a required step if they were to be properly licensed.
The site chosen for the four-acre garden is on the Thames in the Chelsea area of London. In the seventeenth century it was not roads but the river that provided the primary means of transportation and communication for the city and beyond. Its warm microclimate fostered exotic plants that farther inland would have succumbed to the cold. In addition, the society’s barge, which transported those on “herborizing” expeditions to nearby sites such as Battersea or Putney Heath, could be moored there alongside those of the chandlers, vintners, goldsmiths, and others, helping to establish by proximity the legitimacy of the new profession.
It was precious land in 1673, as it is today. The Great Fire in 1666 had left huge sections of London in waste so that good land, especially on the river, was in short supply. Chelsea was a fashionable area with its grand houses and important residents, remembered then and now for once being the home of Sir Thomas More. The Chelsea Physic Garden remains on its original site, accessible to local residents and visitors from around the world. Today many garden lovers who flock to Chelsea for the most famous of annual garden shows make the short walk to visit the Physic Garden.
Over the years the land would be coveted by many for a variety of purposes, but the garden’s original patron, Sir Hans Sloane, outwitted them all through clever provisions in the deed of covenant ensuring the garden’s survival through good times and bad. Sloane was a wealthy doctor, having studied medicine at the French University in Orange, then at the University of Montpellier in France, and eventually at the Royal College of Physicians in London. In 1687 he traveled to Jamaica as personal physician to the governor of the island, there pursuing his interest in plants and investing in quinine as a treatment for malaria, a disease prevalent in the marshy areas of Britain.
A wood engraving shows men botanizing in the Chelsea Physic Garden near the statue of Sir Hans Sloane in 1750.
A statue of Hans Sloane stands at the center of the Chelsea Physic Garden. Today half of the surrounding planting area is dedicated to systematic order beds, the monocots on one side and dicots on the other. The medicinal beds are arranged according to use, including, for example, neurology, rheumatology, anesthesia, analgesia, and dermatology. The cardiology bed displays khella (Ammi visnaga, also known as toothpick-plant or bishop’s weed), from which two essential drugs are now synthesized: nifedepine to treat angina and high blood pressure and amiodarone used to stabilize heart rhythm. Included is a small paradise garden whose four beds focus on plants rich in vitamins A, B, C, and E.
Sloane’s involvement was of benefit to the Apothecaries’ Garden, as it was originally named, in another way. He was responsible for the appointment of Philip Miller as superintendent. A Scotsman, Miller was fortuitously given the position in 1722 as he was about to be evicted from the land occupied by his large nursery. At Chelsea he called on his international connections including that with Joseph Banks in Australasia and John Bartram in North America, thereby doubling in the years from 1722 to 1771 the number of plant species in Britain.
Among the plants Miller is credited with importing and describing is Cedrus libani (cedar of Lebanon), a favorite of English gardeners then and now. Miller also grew Catharanthus roseus, an important medicinal plant now cropped as vincristine, an ingredient in chemotherapy treatment for blood cancers such as leukemia and lymphoma. Conversely, Gossypium hirsutum (long-stapled cotton) was sent by the Chelsea Physic Garden to the English colony of Georgia in America.
As he developed the Chelsea Physic Garden, Miller compiled his Gardeners Dictionary, describing plants, their cultivation, and uses. Translated into Dutch, German, and French, Miller’s dictionary was among the most used and influential of the many horticultural books of the eighteenth century. He used a classification system based on vegetative characteristics, rejecting until the final eighth edition of the dictionary the Linnaean system based upon sexual characteristics. The Gardeners Dictionary was not illustrated, but Miller encouraged botanical artists, most famously Georg Dionysius Ehret, Jacobus van Huysum, and Mary Delaney. Miller was succeeded by William Forsyth, another Scotsman, who served until 1848, continuing to increase the holdings, name plants, and teach botany.
Teaching was the original purpose of the Chelsea Physic Garden. Today the garden carries on this purpose and tradition. The signage is exceptionally good, explaining clearly and in detail the plants and their use. Added beds highlight current topics such as restoration of land damaged by pollution, over-fertilization, climate change, or natural disaster. Here the visitor sees alpine pennycress (Thlaspi caerulescens) which removes zinc and cadmium from soil polluted by industry; sugarbeet (Beta vulgaris), which removes salt from sandy soil; and the sunflower (Helianthus annuus), shown after the Chernobyl nuclear disaster to remove radioactive strontium. The international seed exchange established by Philip Miller in the 1700s continues. Workshops and lectures are offered to the public. Carrying on the garden’s nineteenth-century practice of training young women botanists, Chelsea Physic Garden’s educational programs help today’s teachers learn how to plant, sustain, and teach through school gardens.
Hans Sloane dominates the Chelsea Physic Garden today as he did in life. The bed in the immediate foreground now features plants used in ophthalmology.
Teaching remains a primary purpose of the Chelsea Physic Garden.
John Bartram’s garden shows the simplicity of his planting beds, laid out for utilitarian, not aesthetic, purposes.
Philadelphia, Pennsylvania
Although John Bartram and Peter Collinson never met, they formed a friendship that lasted two-thirds of the eighteenth century. Bartram was a prosperous farmer in the Quaker colony of Pennsylvania, Collinson a London nurseryman. Separated by an ocean, they were bound together by two common loyalties. Both were Quakers and both were collectors of plants. Their exchange of seeds and plants would initiate a transformation of horticulture in Europe and in what would become the United States.
Just one hundred years after John Tradescant had disembarked at Jamestown, John Bartram purchased his 102-acre farm on the west bank of the Lower Schuylkill River. Near the house he laid out the garden in simple rectangular beds which he labeled “upper kitchen,” “common flowers,” and “new flowers.” Two allées of tall trees marked a modest descent to the water. Here he began to indulge his passion for plants, first combing the nearby pine barrens for unusual and unknown plants, then returning with seedlings to his garden beds and to the fields surrounding his house. He was developing the first botanical garden in North America.
The toothache tree is an example of the Doctrine of Signatures, a widely held belief that a plant’s characteristics point to the part of the body it may be used to heal.
On his travels John Bartram discovered the carnivorous Venus flytrap, shown here with a lacewing entrapped.
Soon he was traveling farther afield to Massachusetts and the Carolinas, then the New York Catskills, the Virginia Tidewater, and the Blue Ridge Mountains, directly observing and recording the natural environment of newly discovered plants. Within five years he was corresponding with Peter Collinson, sending seeds from North America in letters detailing the plants, their characteristics, and the growing conditions. As the primary supplier of plants to the great English estates, Collinson was well connected to the English gardening world. He read Bartram’s letters to the influential Royal Society. Some were even published in the prestigious journal Philosophical Transactions. Through Collinson, John Bartram was recognized in England as a legitimate collector and scientific observer.
Bartram employed the Linnaean system of binomial nomenclature and classification that was just coming into use. But the confusion arising from common names continued. For example, Aralia spinosa and Zanthoxylum americanum, though unrelated, were both called prickly ash. Bartram distinguished the two, calling the aralia “devil’s walking stick” and Zanthoxylum americanum “toothache tree.” His insistence on clarity in identifying plants contributed to his reputation as horticulturist.
Bartram made one of his most delicious discoveries in the coastal marshes of South Carolina. He called the newly identified Venus flytrap “tipitiwitchet” and marveled at the way it lured insects with its sweet nectar, then trapped them with its miniature bear-trap, and slowly digested them. He sent this special treasure to Collinson, who in turn sent it to Linnaeus to be named and classified. Writing to thank Bartram, Collinson declared that Linnaeus would be in raptures for it seemed to be the link he sought between the plant and animal kingdoms.
Bartram’s reputation grew both at home and abroad. He soon was known as one of America’s intellectuals. He and Benjamin Franklin founded the highly regarded American Philosophical Society. In 1765, probably at the recommendation of Collinson, Bartram received a royal commission as king’s botanist and in that capacity traveled to Florida searching for plants.
Flowering trees, rhododendrons, and mountain laurels were among the plants native to North America that he sent to Collinson in response to growing demand from the owners of the great English estates. With Collinson as middleman, Bartram also sent American native plants to Philip Miller at the Chelsea Physic Garden. Recognizing the extent of Bartram’s collection, the University of Pennsylvania forwent establishing a demonstration garden of its own, instead using Bartram’s garden for teaching purposes. George Washington had two boxes of plants and seeds sent to Mount Vernon from Bartram’s nursery. Thomas Jefferson was a customer and advice-seeker. John Bartram and his garden established Philadelphia as the center for horticulture in the American colonies, a position it retains in the United States today.
John Bartram’s sons William and John found this rare and elegant tree in the colony of Georgia, naming it Franklinia for their father’s dear friend, Benjamin Franklin. It has disappeared from the wild but grows in Bartram’s garden in Philadelphia.
In 1777, when Franklin was American minister in France, he recommended that his friend send seeds to France, opening new lanes of commerce. When the first broadside appeared in 1783 listing Bartram plants for sale, it was printed in French as well as English. After John Bartram’s death his sons William and John took over the collection and nursery business, receiving visitors from America and Europe, including James Madison, George Mason, and Alexander Hamilton when they were attending the Constitutional Convention in Philadelphia.
John Bartram made North America a player in the study of horticulture and botany, his scientific research standing alongside that of his counterparts in Padua, Leiden, Chelsea, and other European botanical gardens. Their collective work and the continued development of the botanical gardens changed horticulture, agriculture, medicine, and industry. Landscape design was transformed by the thousands of plants made available through the voyages of discovery and the botanical gardens that housed and studied them.
