---
title: "History of botany"
chunk: 3/10
source: "https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_botany"
category: "reference"
tags: "science, encyclopedia"
date_saved: "2026-05-05T03:59:20.683361+00:00"
instance: "kb-cron"
---

=== Ancient China ===
In ancient China, lists of different plants and herb concoctions for pharmaceutical purposes date back to at least the time of the Warring States (481 BC-221 BC). Many Chinese writers over the centuries contributed to the written knowledge of herbal pharmaceutics. The Chinese dictionary-encyclopaedia Erh Ya probably dates from about 300 BC and describes about 334 plants classed as trees or shrubs, each with a common name and illustration. The Han Dynasty (202 BC-220 AD) includes the notable work of the Huangdi Neijing and the famous pharmacologist Zhang Zhongjing.

== Medieval knowledge ==

=== Medicinal plants of the early Middle Ages ===

In Western Europe, after Theophrastus, botany passed through a bleak period of 1800 years when little progress was made and, indeed, many of the early insights were lost. As Europe entered the Middle Ages (5th to 15th centuries), China, India and the Arab world enjoyed a golden age. 

==== Medieval China ====

Chinese philosophy had followed a similar path to that of the ancient Greeks. Between 100 and 1700 AD, many new works on pharmaceutical botany were produced. The 11th century scientists and statesmen Su Song and Shen Kuo compiled learned treatises on natural history, emphasising herbal medicine. Among the pharmaceutical botany works were encyclopaedic accounts and treatises compiled for the Chinese imperial court. These were free of superstition and myth with carefully researched descriptions and nomenclature; they included cultivation information and notes on economic and medicinal uses — and even elaborate monographs on ornamental plants. But there was no experimental method and no analysis of the plant sexual system, nutrition, or anatomy.

==== Medieval India ====
In India, simple artificial plant classification became more botanical with the work of Parashara (c. 400 – c. 500 AD), the author of Vṛksayurveda (the science of life of trees). Important medieval Indian works of plant physiology include the Prthviniraparyam of Udayana, Nyayavindutika of Dharmottara, Saddarsana-samuccaya of Gunaratna, and Upaskara of Sankaramisra.

==== Islamic Golden Age ====

The 400-year period from the 9th to 13th centuries AD was the Islamic Renaissance, a time when Islamic culture and science thrived. Greco-Roman texts were preserved, copied and extended although new texts always emphasised the medicinal aspects of plants. Kurdish biologist Ābu Ḥanīfah Āḥmad ibn Dawūd Dīnawarī (828–896 AD) is known as the founder of Arabic botany; his Kitâb al-nabât ('Book of Plants') describes 637 species, discussing plant development from germination to senescence and including details of flowers and fruits. The Mutazilite philosopher and physician Ibn Sina (Avicenna) (c. 980–1037 AD) was another influential figure, his The Canon of Medicine being a landmark in the history of medicine treasured until the Enlightenment.

=== The Silk Road ===
Following the fall of Constantinople (1453), the newly expanded Ottoman Empire welcomed European embassies in its capital, which in turn became the sources of plants from those regions to the east which traded with the empire. In the following century, twenty times as many plants entered Europe along the Silk Road as had been transported in the previous two thousand years, mainly as bulbs. Others were acquired primarily for their alleged medicinal value. Initially, Italy benefited from this new knowledge, especially Venice, which traded extensively with the East. From there, these new plants rapidly spread to the rest of Western Europe. By the middle of the sixteenth century, there was already a flourishing export trade of various bulbs from Turkey to Europe.

=== The Age of Herbals ===

In the European Middle Ages of the 15th and 16th centuries, the lives of European citizens were based around agriculture but when printing arrived, with movable type and woodcut illustrations, it was not treatises on agriculture that were published, but lists of medicinal plants with descriptions of their properties or "virtues". These first plant books, known as herbals showed that botany was still a part of medicine, as it had been for most of ancient history. Authors of herbals were often curators of university gardens, and most herbals were derivative compilations of classic texts, especially De Materia Medica. 

The authors of the oldest herbals of the 16th century, Brunfels, Fuchs, Bock, Mattioli and others, regarded plants mainly as the vehicles of medicinal virtues. ... Their chief object was to discover the plants employed by the physicians of antiquity, the knowledge of which had been lost in later times. The corrupt texts of Theophrastus, Dioscorides, Pliny and Galen had been in many respects improved and illustrated by ... Italian commentators of the 15th and ... early part of the 16th century; but there was one imperfection which no criticism could remove,—the highly unsatisfactory descriptions of the old authors or the entire absence of descriptions.It was moreover at first assumed that the plants described by the Greek physicians must grow wild in Germany also, and generally in the rest of Europe; each author identified a different native plant with some one mentioned by Dioscorides or Theophrastus or others, and thus there arose [in] the 16th century a confusion of nomenclature.
However, the need for accurate and detailed plant descriptions meant that some herbals were more botanical than medicinal. 