---
title: "History of botany"
chunk: 5/10
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"
---

Public and private gardens have always been strongly associated with the historical unfolding of botanical science.
Early botanical gardens were physic gardens, repositories for the medicinal plants described in the herbals. As they were generally associated with universities or other academic institutions, the plants were also used for study. The directors of these gardens were eminent physicians with an educational role as "scientific gardeners" and it was staff of these institutions that produced many of the published herbals.
The botanical gardens of the modern tradition were established in northern Italy, the first being at Pisa (1544), founded by Luca Ghini (1490–1556). Although part of a medical faculty, the first chair of materia medica, essentially a chair in botany, was established in Padua in 1533. Then in 1534, Ghini became Reader in materia medica at Bologna University, where Ulisse Aldrovandi established a similar garden in 1568 (see below).  Collections of pressed and dried specimens were called a hortus siccus (garden of dry plants) and the first accumulation of plants in this way (including the use of a plant press) is attributed to Ghini. Buildings called herbaria housed these specimens mounted on card with descriptive labels. Stored in cupboards in systematic order, they could be preserved in perpetuity and easily transferred or exchanged with other institutions, a taxonomic procedure that is still used today.
By the 18th century, the physic gardens had been transformed into "order beds" that demonstrated the classification systems that were being devised by botanists of the day — but they also had to accommodate the influx of curious, beautiful and new plants pouring in from voyages of exploration that were associated with European colonial expansion.

=== From Herbal to Flora ===

Plant classification systems of the 17th and 18th centuries now related plants to one another and not to man, marking a return to the non-anthropocentric botanical science promoted by Theophrastus over 1500 years before. In England, various herbals in either Latin or English were mainly compilations and translations of continental European works, of limited relevance to the British Isles. This included the rather unreliable work of Gerard (1597). The first systematic attempt to collect information on British plants was that of Thomas Johnson (1629), who was later to issue his own revision of Gerard's work (1633–1636).
However, Johnson was not the first apothecary or physician to organise botanical expeditions to systematise their local flora. In Italy, Ulisse Aldrovandi (1522 – 1605) organised an expedition to the Sibylline mountains in Umbria in 1557, and compiled a local Flora. He then began to disseminate his findings amongst other European scholars, forming an early network of knowledge sharing "molti amici in molti luoghi" (many friends in many places), including Charles de l'Écluse (Clusius) (1526 – 1609) at Montpellier and Jean de Brancion at Malines. Between them, they started developing Latin names for plants, in addition to their common names. The exchange of information and specimens between scholars was often associated with the founding of botanical gardens (above), and to this end Aldrovandi founded one of the earliest at his university in Bologna, the Orto Botanico di Bologna in 1568.
In France, Clusius journeyed throughout most of Western Europe, making discoveries in the vegetable kingdom along the way. He compiled Flora of Spain (1576), and Austria and Hungary (1583). He was the first to propose dividing plants into classes. Meanwhile, in Switzerland, from 1554, Conrad Gessner (1516 – 1565) made regular explorations of the Swiss Alps from his native Zurich and discovered many new plants. He proposed that there were groups or genera of plants.  He said that each genus was composed of many species and that these were defined by similar flowers and fruits. This principle of organisation laid the groundwork for future botanists. He wrote his important Historia Plantarum shortly before his death. At Malines, in Flanders he established and maintained the botanical gardens of Jean de Brancion from 1568 to 1573, and first encountered tulips.
This approach coupled with the new Linnaean system of binomial nomenclature resulted in plant encyclopaedias without medicinal information called Floras that meticulously described and illustrated the plants growing in particular regions. The 17th century also marked the beginning of experimental botany and application of a rigorous scientific method, while improvements in the microscope launched the new discipline of plant anatomy whose foundations, laid by the careful observations of Englishman Nehemiah Grew and Italian Marcello Malpighi, would last for 150 years.

=== Botanical exploration ===

More new lands were opening up to European colonial powers, the botanical riches being returned to European botanists for description. This was a romantic era of botanical explorers, intrepid plant hunters and gardener-botanists. Significant botanical collections came from: the West Indies (Hans Sloane (1660–1753)); China (James Cunningham); the spice islands of the East Indies (Moluccas, George Rumphius (1627–1702)); China and Mozambique (João de Loureiro (1717–1791)); West Africa (Michel Adanson (1727–1806)) who devised his own classification scheme and forwarded a crude theory of the mutability of species; Canada, Hebrides, Iceland, New Zealand by Captain James Cook's chief botanist Joseph Banks (1743–1820).

=== Classification and morphology ===