The First Botanical Gardens

[A] The gardens attached to sixteenth-century medical schools were not built for pleasure, and their founders would have found the suggestion odd. [B] They were teaching collections. A student was expected to recognise, growing in the ground, the plants he would later be trusted to prescribe, and the beds were laid out according to the classification then in use, so that walking along them was a way of reading a list. [C] The design was an argument about order as much as a place to grow things. [D]

What unsettled the gardens was distance. Ships returning from the tropics landed material that no European scheme could accommodate, and the gardens became the rooms in which that difficulty was worked out. They also became instruments of trade, because a plant raised in one colony could be grown on, tested and shipped to another, and several crops now thought of as native somewhere arrived by exactly that route. Separating the scientific purpose from the commercial one is difficult in the surviving record, since a single voyage served both and a single catalogue registered both. Historians who present the gardens as pure enquiry and historians who present them as an arm of commerce are each describing something that was genuinely there.