Between 1669 and 1676 he served as a governor of Dutch Malabar at Kochi and employed twenty-five people on his book Hortus Malabaricus, describing 740 plants in the region.

[1] Van Rheede was born into a family of noblemen that played a leading role in the political, administrative and cultural life of the province of Utrecht.

In 1656 he joined as a soldier in the Dutch East India Company (V.O.C., Vereenigde Oostindische Compagnie) and served alongside Johan Bax van Herenthals (who would also take an interest in natural history).

In 1665 he was appointed as commander in Jaffna and had Johan Nieuhof who at the time was the Dutch chief at Tuticorin, arrested for smuggling pearls[3] and sent to Batavia for trial.

[4] The resignation was made as he opposed the repressive measures of Van Goens and instead favoured negotiation, but in 1670 he is appointed as commander of Dutch Malabar.

[citation needed] In 1684 he was empowered by the "directors" (Council of Seventeen) of the Company to inspect the Cape Colony, Ceylon and Dutch India to combat corruption within their employees.

[11] Hendrik van Rheede's work on the plants of the Malabar region began in 1674[12] and it was around 1675 that the draft of the first volume of the Hortus Malabaricus was produced.

Since 1660, the Dutch East India Company had encouraged publication of scientific work and the documentation of the useful plants by Van Rheede would help in the fight against local diseases.

The first volume of the Hortus Malabaricus was published in 1678, a compendium of the plants of economic and medical value in the south Indian Malabar region, was undertaken when "Jonkheer" Hendrik van Rheede was the Dutch Governor of Cochin and continued for the next three decades.

The ethno-medical information presented in the work was extracted from palm leaf manuscripts by a famous practitioner of herbal medicine named Itty Achuden.

He was supported by a team of three Konkani physicians: Appu Bhatt, Ranga Bhatt and Vinayaka Pandit, The compilations were edited by a team of nearly a hundred including physicians, professors of medicine and botany, amateur botanists (such as professor Arnold Seyn, Theodore Jansson of Almeloveen, Paul Hermann, Johannes Munnicks, Jan Commelin, Abraham Poot, the translator of a Dutch version), Indian scholars and vaidyas (physicians) of Malabar and adjacent regions, and technicians, illustrators and engravers, together with the collaboration of company officials, clergymen (Johannes Casearius and Father Mathew of St. Joseph).

[17] While visiting the Cape in 1685, van Rheede considered a work on African plants of economic importance, Hortus Africanus, but this idea was never realized.