Botanical garden

In principle, their role is to maintain documented collections of living plants for the purposes of scientific research, conservation, display, and education, although this will depend on the resources available and the special interests pursued at each particular garden.

It covers in some detail the many functions and activities generally associated with botanical gardens:[5] A botanical garden is a controlled and staffed institution for the maintenance of a living collection of plants under scientific management for purposes of education and research, together with such libraries, herbaria, laboratories, and museums as are essential to its particular undertakings.

Each botanical garden naturally develops its own special fields of interests depending on its personnel, location, extent, available funds, and the terms of its charter.

It maintains a scientific as well as a plant-growing staff, and publication is one of its major modes of expression.This broad outline is then expanded:[5] The botanic garden may be an independent institution, a governmental operation, or affiliated to a college or university.

If a single function were to be chosen from the early literature on botanical gardens, it would be their scientific endeavour and, flowing from this, their instructional value.

The scientific reputation of a botanical garden is judged by the publications coming out of herbaria and similar facilities, not by its living collections.

[7] Their focus has been on creating an awareness of the threat to the Earth's ecosystems from human populations and its consequent need for biological and physical resources.

Education programs can help the public develop greater environmental awareness by understanding the meaning and importance of ideas like conservation and sustainability.

[8] Worldwide, there are now about 1800 botanical gardens and arboreta in about 150 countries (mostly in temperate regions) of which about 550 are in Europe (150 of which are in Russia),[9] 200 in North America,[10] and an increasing number in East Asia.

[12] Historically, botanical gardens exchanged plants through the publication of seed lists (called Latin: Indices Seminae in the 18th century).

[18] In the 18th century, they became more educational in function, demonstrating the latest plant classification systems devised by botanists working in the associated herbaria as they tried to order these new treasures.

[21] Near-eastern royal gardens set aside for economic use or display and containing at least some plants gained by special collecting trips or military campaigns abroad, are known from the second millennium BCE in ancient Egypt, Mesopotamia, Crete, Mexico and China.

[23] In about 2800 BCE, the Chinese Emperor Shen Nung sent collectors to distant regions searching for plants with economic or medicinal value.

Ibn Bassal then founded a garden in Seville, most of its plants being collected on a botanical expedition that included Morocco, Persia, Sicily, and Egypt.

[nb 2] Here the physicians (known in English as apothecaries) delivered lectures on the Mediterranean "simples" or "officinals" that were being cultivated in the grounds.

For example, Asian introductions were described by Carolus Clusius (1526–1609), who was director, in turn, of the Botanical Garden of the University of Vienna and Hortus Botanicus Leiden.

[50] In the mid to late 17th century, the Paris Jardin des Plantes was a centre of interest with the greatest number of new introductions to attract the public.

[51] With the increase in maritime trade, ever more plants were brought back to Europe as trophies from distant lands, and these were triumphantly displayed in the private estates of the wealthy, in commercial nurseries, and in the public botanical gardens.

From the 1770s, following the example of the French and Spanish, amateur collectors were supplemented by official horticultural and botanical plant hunters.

[56] 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.

[57] 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,[58] and acting as "the great botanical exchange house of the British Empire".

[63] 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.

[64] 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.

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.

[69] 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.

Specialised gardens like the Palmengarten in Frankfurt, Germany (1869), one of the world's leading orchid and succulent plant collections, have been very popular.

[82] Plant conservation and the heritage value of exceptional historic landscapes were treated with a growing sense of urgency through the 20th century.

These may be held as seeds dried and stored at low temperature, or in tissue culture (such as the Kew Millennium Seedbank); as living plants, including those that are of special horticultural, historical or scientific interest (such as those in the National Plant Collection in the United Kingdom); or by managing and preserving areas of natural vegetation.

[2] The Palestine Museum of Natural History has a botanic garden, which has been described as a site of nation-building and resistance by Silvia Hassouna.

The gardens have in its view continuously adapted to new demands in a changing environment, coming to serve the "core mission of ex situ conservation".