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| title | chunk | source | category | tags | date_saved | instance |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Botanical garden | 4/5 | https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Botanical_garden | reference | science, encyclopedia | 2026-05-05T04:29:01.074157+00:00 | kb-cron |
At this time, British horticulturalists were importing many woody plants from Britain's colonies in North America, and the popularity of horticulture had increased enormously, encouraged by the horticultural and botanical collecting expeditions overseas fostered by the directorship of Sir William Jackson Hooker and his keen interest in economic botany. At the end of the 18th century, Kew, under the directorship of Sir Joseph Banks, enjoyed a golden age of plant hunting, sending out collectors to the South African Cape, Australia, Chile, China, Ceylon, Brazil, and elsewhere, and acting as "the great botanical exchange house of the British Empire". From its earliest days to the present, Kew has in many ways exemplified botanic garden ideals, and is respected worldwide for the published work of its scientists, the education of horticultural students, its public programmes, and the scientific underpinning of its horticulture. In 1728, John Bartram founded Bartram's Garden in Philadelphia, one of the continent's first botanical gardens. The garden is now managed as a historical site that includes a few original and many modern specimens as well as extensive archives and restored historical farm buildings.
==== Plant classification ====
The large number of plants needing description were listed in garden catalogues; and from 1753 Carl Linnaeus established the system of binomial nomenclature which greatly facilitated the listing process. Names of plants were authenticated by dried plant specimens mounted on card (a hortus siccus or garden of dried plants) that were stored in buildings called herbaria. These taxonomic research institutions were frequently associated with the botanical gardens, many of which by then had "order beds" to display the classification systems being developed by botanists in the gardens' museums and herbaria. Botanical gardens became scientific collections, as botanists published their descriptions of the new exotic plants, and these were recorded for posterity in detail by superb botanical illustrations. Botanical gardens effectively dropped their medicinal function in favour of scientific and aesthetic priorities, and the term "botanic garden" came to be more closely associated with the herbarium, library, and laboratories housed there than with the living collections—on which little research was undertaken.
=== 19th century ===
The late 18th and early 19th centuries were marked by the establishment of tropical botanical gardens as a tool of colonial expansion (for trade and commerce and, secondarily, science) mainly by the British and Dutch, in India, South-east Asia, and the Caribbean. This was also the time of Sir Joseph Banks's botanical collections during Captain James Cook's circumnavigations of the planet and his explorations of Oceania, with plant introductions on a grand scale.
==== Tropical ==== There are currently about 230 tropical botanical gardens, many of them in southern and south-eastern Asia. The first botanical garden founded in the tropics was the Pamplemousses Botanical Garden in Mauritius, established in 1735 to provide food for ships using the port, but later trialling and distributing many plants of economic importance. This was followed by the West Indies (Saint Vincent and the Grenadines Botanic Gardens, 1764) and in 1786 by the Acharya Jagadish Chandra Bose Botanical Garden in Calcutta, India, founded during a period of prosperity when the city was a trading centre for the Dutch East India Company. Other gardens were constructed in Brazil (Rio de Janeiro Botanical Garden, 1808), Sri Lanka (Botanic Gardens of Peradeniya, 1821, on a site dating back to 1371), Indonesia (Bogor Botanical Gardens, 1817 and Kebun Raya Cibodas, 1852), and Singapore (Singapore Botanical Gardens, 1822). These had a profound effect on the economy of the countries, especially in relation to the foods and medicines introduced. The importation of rubber trees to the Singapore Botanic Garden initiated the important rubber industry of the Malay Peninsula. At this time also, teak and tea were introduced to India, and breadfruit, pepper, and starfruit to the Caribbean.
Included in the charter of these gardens was the investigation of the local flora for its economic potential to both the colonists and the local people. Many crop plants were introduced by or through these gardens—often in association with European botanical gardens such as Kew or Amsterdam—and included cloves, tea, coffee, breadfruit, cinchona, sugar, cotton, palm oil, and Theobroma cacao (for chocolate). During these times, the rubber plant was introduced to Singapore. Especially in the tropics, the larger gardens were frequently associated with a herbarium and museum of economy. The Botanical Garden of Peradeniya had considerable influence on the development of agriculture in Ceylon where the Para rubber tree (Hevea brasiliensis) was introduced from Kew, which had itself imported the plant from South America. Other examples include cotton from the Chelsea Physic Garden to the Province of Georgia in 1732 and tea into India by the Calcutta Botanic Garden. The transfer of germplasm between the temperate and tropical botanical gardens was undoubtedly responsible for the range of agricultural crops currently used in several regions of the tropics.
==== Temperate ====
The first botanical gardens in Australia were founded early in the 19th century: the Royal Botanic Gardens, Sydney, 1816; the Royal Tasmanian Botanical Gardens, 1818; the Royal Botanic Gardens, Melbourne, 1845; Adelaide Botanic Gardens, 1854; and Brisbane Botanic Gardens, 1855. These were established essentially as colonial gardens of economic botany and acclimatisation. South Africa has 10 national botanical gardens, all overseen by the South African National Biodiversity Institute. The oldest in South Africa is the 1851 Durban Botanic Gardens. The Kirstenbosch National Botanical Garden is the most famous and developed garden in the country, established in 1913 on a site dating to 1848. It covers 36 hectares, with an additional 528 hectares of mountainside wilderness forming part of the garden. Stellenbosch University Botanical Garden is South Africa's oldest university botanical garden; it was established in 1922. Also in the country is the Karoo Desert National Botanical Garden, founded in 1921 and relocated in 1945. Elsewhere in Africa, Orman Garden at Giza in Egypt was founded in 1875.